


Metamorphosis

by Left_Handed_Rick



Category: Rick and Morty
Genre: 50's diner, Adventure, Aphrodisiacs, Asshole!Rick, Behaviour-altering Parasites, Biochemistry, Body Dysphoria, Body Horror, Desecration of a Decomposing Body, Doomed Teenager Trope, Drug-Induced Sex, Drug-Induced Suicide, Dubious Consent with Alien Lifeforms, Emetophilia, Existentialism, Flawed characters, Flowery Gore, Formicophilia, Hyperparasitism, Ice Cream, Imitative Behavior, Jukebox Ex Machina, Lyrical prose, M/M, Medical Kink, Multi, Myiasis, Natural Selection, Necrophilia, Needles, Other, Parasitic relationships, Pathogen, Pining, Podfic Available, Psychosis, Scientist!Rick, Self-Harm, Snuff, Starry Citadel AU, Toxic Relationships, Trypophobia, UST, Unreliable Narrator, Unrequited, Venereal Disease, Viral Infection, Wholesome Kink, astrobiology, bacterial infection, cordyceps, cosmic horror, infectious disease, non-established relationship, radio ex machina, sex-pollen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-31
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2021-01-05 22:09:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 3
Words: 36,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21215843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Left_Handed_Rick/pseuds/Left_Handed_Rick
Summary: “Sometimes science is more art than science, Morty. A lot of people don’t get that."





	1. Fluorescence

**Author's Note:**

  * For [futagogo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/futagogo/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Mycophilia](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10424940) by [futagogo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/futagogo/pseuds/futagogo). 

> Thanks so much to the beta readers and brainstormers who helped make this fic shine: Squikkums, ThankyouLeibe, and FiNR!  

> 
> ###  Author's Note/Introduction 
> 
> This is a horror fic with heavy themes of the grotesque, body horror, and cosmic/existential horror elements, with a strong focus on emotional and psychological terror. I’ve detailed some spoiler courtesy warnings along with my own author meta-commentary over on the [ fic page. ](https://starry-citadel-au.neocities.org/metamorphosis.html)
> 
> **Rick and Morty D-135: ** Fun Fact. This fic originally began as a scene for [ Afterlife. ](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13164759/chapters/30109404) But I loved the idea for the ending so much, I let it grow into its own fic. You might pick up some of the similarities.  

> 
> ###  Extras For This Fic 
> 
> [ ✦ Fic Art Gallery ](https://starry-citadel-au.neocities.org/metamorphosis.html)   
[ ✦ Fic Endnotes ](https://starry-citadel-au.neocities.org/metamorphosis.html)   
[ ✦ Youtube Playlist, Because Science ](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrWLuvbMN7cCYCp5vP_2gVNe_G3sow5yh)   
[ ✦ Follow Along Playlist on Spotify ](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/07CJFeyKylYWkfV1KVXisJ?si=espryOVkT2SjAtEcUDL_Zg)

The silence was alive. 

Awestricken, Morty took in the glade of the ambient forest. Crepuscular rivers of life-giving light poured into the dense primordial undergrowth of the ecosystem's floor. 

His grandfather, a few paces ahead, disappeared through the strange veil, and the teen stepped forward to follow. 

Feeling abducted within the strong beam of light, Morty nervously swallowed. He extended his hand toward its surreal void-like edges, watching his own shadow thread beneath his movements. The strange optical illusion fell between the worlds of what was familiar and what was still unknown.

“[Morty!]” A static noise hissed in Morty’s earpiece, and the familiar gravelly voice impatiently accosted the natural quiet. Morty startled, nearly losing his footing. 

“[Aw, Jeez, I—]” he panicked, stirred to action by the restless tone. “[—I, Uh, Okay].”

He held his breath and closed both eyes; re-opening one to watch his fingers dip, then disappear into the atmospheric wall of shadow. He let out a quick sigh of relief when nothing immediately happened and stepped across the ethereal threshold. 

He squinted as his eyes adjusted to his new surroundings. Up ahead, the older man prowled through the tangle of bioluminescent vines and organic masses (aided on the adventure with only his lab coat, a pair of gloves, and a simple respirator mask). Trailing tendrils of spores stirred in the fluid movements of the scientists wake, and the particles of disturbed dust refracted and glowed against the low-lights as the pair traversed through the dense foliage. 

Morty’s footsteps fumbled in-toe to the gentle tread of the scientist's, but when his vision was finally able to process the world he had followed Rick into, his pace fell to a standstill once again. Through the glass window of his helmet, he excitedly glanced around himself, expression alight.

“[Wow, Grandpa Rick! Look at—Look at all these alien plants]!”

The subharmonic thrum of energy pulsed around them and Morty felt his blood surge in intuitive response as he fell still, momentarily stricken by the surrounding ecosystem that was brimming and pulsing with efflorescent life.

He reached out his suited hand, frustrated with the limited range of motion; the necessary barrier between himself and the world they had ventured into. 

“[Do I really have to wear this suit]?” Morty frowned, wondering if Rick had put him into a giant yellow space diaper just to make fun of him. “[I mean, you’re not wearing one].” 

“[—Cause I’ve inoculated myself against most everything we’re gonna find here],” Rick quickly responded, cutting off any chance at negotiation. “[Uranium in your bloodstream is a pretty good deterrent... It’s a good thing I passed on my genes before my DNA went to shit—A-anyways, you should be thankful you _ have _ a space helmet. I-It smells like three kinds of death out here—ugh don't trip into one of those _ Rickfleesa _plants].”

Even beneath the layers of protective equipment that Rick had insistently cloaked him in, the tingling sensation clung like a charged electric current to Morty’s skin. Maybe Rick was right. 

“[—Gotta keep up, Morty],” there was an urgency in Rick’s voice as he explained without stopping, “[we need to—we gotta— we’re losing artificial daylight. I-It’s not gonna be like some night hike, Morty. Without a moon? This place gets pitch].”

The forest seemingly existed in a different time and space, unregulated and uncontrolled by Rick hands in the way the rest of the Citadel had been. Morty couldn't help but feel guilty for trespassing into it. The lack of human presence felt both sacred and unsettling. Wisps of vapor blanketed the mossy forest floor, covering the plants in a thin gaseous veneer, and Morty struggled to see where he was stepping. 

"[What is this place, Grandpa Rick?]"

“[It’s pretty much the bio-cycling center of the Citadel. A self-contained ecosystem, full of decompositional fungus and foliage... helps regulate the overall biome of the fishbowl].” 

The older man paused to wait for the teen to catch up to him once again, before continuing in silence for a few paces. “[Yep, everything's gotta rot somewhere, Morty. Really makes you confront what it means to be a living thing—wh-what it means to die. ‘Cause on a biological level, life _ always _finds a way].”

The distance grew between them as Morty struggled to match the scientist’s natural pace. He clambered after his grandfather in a full biohazard suit, trying to reciprocate with a leave no trace attitude as he moved through the previously undisturbed traces of life. 

Three steps forward from that thought before he tripped. 

“[Wh-what the hell, Morty]?” Rick pivoted at the sound of Morty’s signature cry of helplessness, just in time to watch his line of continued genes gracelessly flail onto the forest floor. Rick strode a few steps closer, eyes scanning, and after a moment of assessment, the older man reticently sighed, slowing his pace as Morty continued to groan. 

“[Hoooh, ow, I didn’t want to step on—to-to kill anything, Rick]!”

Rick belched as the teen pulled himself into a sitting position on the lush carpet of moss. He grit his teeth, glancing down at the hairy, bright green patches that had flattened beneath him, the plant life swelled back into shape and writhed away from Morty in self-preservation.

“[Yeah, how’d that work out for you]?” Rick gently chuckled at the teen’s misery as he moved closer.

“[Morty, you just gotta—don’t think about it—just go with the flow here],” Rick's voice chided into the receiver in the teen's ear, wholly undeterred by the fact that a plant had just animated itself away from Morty. “[Just gotta rip that band-aid off now, you—you'll thank me later. Humans are—they’re pretty much walking biological disasters. I-It’s just natural selection, Morty. Circle of life. The status quo]."

"[Aw jeez, I don’t think. I mean, humans. They haven’t really been around _ that _lo—]"

"[—Calling these plant’s _ alien _ is— it’s redundant, Morty. 'Cause plant life’s inherently ‘alien’ to human…]" 

Rick backtracked their conversation, glancing around them. He _ had _heard the teen’s previous exclamation but had only chosen to respond now, when he wanted to make a point. He reached a hand down to offer assistance to his grandson. Their hands wound together, and with an effortless tug, the older man plucked Morty’s body from the forest floor. Rick’s voice softened as he brushed the dirt away from the teen's suit with heavy slapping movements, “[Gotta be careful, Morty, and by that I mean you gotta—take a page out of nature’s survival guide and look out for yourself first]." 

“[Speak for yourself, Rick].” Morty blushed as the scientist roughly looked after him. 

‘[You’re progeny, Morty. Keeping your dumb ass alive is nothing more than biological self-interest].” 

Unlike the normal, routine lives they had adjusted to on the Citadel, unknown variables lurked in the spaces of the forest they had trespassed into. Rick’s hand fell to rest on Morty's shoulder, giving his grandson a nod of encouragement before releasing his hold, and returning to their path. "[...‘N’ this place is like a giant alien amoeba that we’ve trespassed into]."

"[An amoeba?]" Morty limped a few steps in pursuit, determined to walk off the dull ache in his thigh. Rick tossed a glance over his shoulder, checking on the teen trailing behind him. 

"[It deals with foreign threats by assimilating any—whatever it doesn't understand]." He forced a laugh, trying to lighten the mood, "[Heh, reminds me of an ex… tried to bring me into _ The Fucking Borg _ by giving me space syphilis, Morty—th-that's what happens when you let your guard down around alien lifeforms]."

"[Hah, good thing we're only human, Grandpa Rick]," Morty anxiously laughed in-turn as he watched the inhuman coordination of the 70-year-old man ahead of him. Rick effortlessly leaped over a felled tree throwing a dismissive hand toward the teen's statement.

"[I've got enough cybernetic augmentation to be called cyborg, but I'm _ still human where it counts, baby _]!" Rick spun around to face Morty, playfully grabbing his crotch as he stuck out his tongue with a triumphant laugh. 

Morty blushed, quickly looking away as his grandfather turned his back to him once again. Not even space STD’s could slow his grandfather's down. The shade of his skin flushed deeper, as his pulse began to race at the thought. 

"[Wait, what exactly is space syphilis?]"

Rick’s frame tightened. He shrugged off the question into Morty's earpiece as he continued to set a determined pace for the duo. "[I-It's like Space Ebolaids. All the blemflarks in the universe aren’t worth risking those close encounters of the sixth kind]."

The teen shook his helmet and buried the thought, internally apologizing to the tree trunk as he hoisted himself onto it. He rolled his body over the woody form, knocking free a community of mushrooms and, with a sudden panic he hurriedly glanced over his shoulder, bending to the ground to retrieve the decrepit clumps of foliage. Their undersides were covered in a thin layer of mold that sparkled like a geode. 

Holding his breath, Morty anxiously pressed the chunk of earthy material back to place, and whirled his body around, running to catch up to the scientist.

“[—Jeezus Morty, watch where you’re going]!” Rick’s voice sharply cut into the teen’s eardrums, causing Morty to instantly freeze in recognition of the panicked tone. 

“[Y-you try’n’a get digested in a toxic tidepool]!?”

Morty returned his gaze to the forest floor realizing with a sudden wave of fear that he was footfalls away from walking directly into a large body of water. What had been an opaque surface from a distance, shifted into a transparent cerulean blue as the teen had stepped closer.

“[Dammit Morty, Just—fuckin. Stay put].”

Through the receiver, Morty could hear Rick grumbling expletives under his breath as he backtracked his footsteps toward his grandson, weaving through the series of various sized pools that had accumulated beneath thick columns of light. The only indication of the lethal optical illusion at their feet were clusters of glowing lily pads, blooming across the mirrored surface.

Even from a distance, the teen could see the tell-tale furrowed unibrow, worn only when Rick was angry at Morty for not staying focused on the task at hand. 

“[Aw Jeez],” he lowered his gaze even further, avoiding Rick’s. “[I-I’m sorry Rick].”

Morty swallowed as he peered into the crystal clear depths, waiting for Rick to retrieve him. Glowing organisms bobbed and circled in the seemingly peaceful water below. Morty felt his heart rate calm as he watched their languid movements, but the earlier tone in Rick’s voice had made their potential threat as clear as the water he’d nearly rushed into. 

"[What did I _ just _fucking tell you]?” 

Heat rose once more into his cheeks in embarrassment. 

“[This isn’t the Citadel’s botanical center]." A frustrated sigh escaped Rick’s frame, before he further warned, "[So stop acting like this is a fucking walk in the park].”

Rick pointed to the ground, lecturing the teen on how to look for warning signs. After instructing Morty to follow his lead, Rick safely marked an exit path for the teen to follow. When he had reached the end of the clearing, the scientist’s figure waved his arm in gesture, encouraging the teen to trek closer. The movements of their bodies set into motion a chaotic flurry of glowing firefly-like insects. They flickered into existence as their innocuous forms ascended into the radiant atmosphere. 

Distracted, Morty’s eyes followed the hive-mind murmur, mesmerized. The insects' collective shape entangled and re-formed on itself, pulsing like a thick aureating vein through the invisible, interconnected ecosystem, and peeking through the branching canopy above—beyond the glass of the Citadel they called home—Morty caught a glimpse of the stars against an ochre yellow; it was still daylight.

He returned his gaze to the forest, unable to shake the feeling of walking through a space terrarium. The foliage encroached the makeshift path Rick had created while remaining preserved in a surreal bioluminescent stillness. The lack of wind was unsettling to Morty, reminding him of how strangely familiar yet foreign the surrounding environment was; how far away he’d drifted from his memories of Earth. Lightyears. 

“[Uh, hey Rick?]" Morty instinctively lowered his voice as his eyes flicked toward the alien plants. "[These plants? Are they, uh, you know...uh—alive?]” 

For a stretch of time, Rick was uncharacteristically silent before offering a few static words of warning through his communication device.

“[Morty].” He sighed, “[Don’t ask stupid questions that you don’t want the answers to]." 

Morty's movements grew rigid at the unspoken confirmation in his grandfather's answer, and after a few silent moments of deliberation, he opened his mouth to inquire further. Rick’s voice filled the silence first, overwhelming Morty’s senses. 

"[Look. You gotta—stop trying to make these lifeforms human—seeing it through a human lens. They don’t have the capacity for emotion—just pure survival instinct. A singular genetic will— that they will go to any lengths to fulfill]."

As they passed through the edge of the tidepool clearing, Morty's elbow brushed against the body of a giant fern. It shuddered and shyly pulled away from him, demurely folding its leaves in on itself as its glow dimmed. Morty smiled. It was cute. 

"[They don't seem so bad to me]."

Rick scoffed. A waxy bulb of rosette leaves spiraled around a glowing web-like sac of orbs, and the fibrous material swelled then ruptured as Morty passed, splattering him with glowing magenta sap that clung to his body in thick strings as he tried to wipe it away. Morty shuddered, using a patch of moss to clean himself, thankful for the first time on this adventure that he was in a containment suit. 

"[Yeah, well, looks can be deceiving, Morty...]”

Rick quickly checked over his shoulder at the teen, laughing at his biological money shot as Morty rolled his eyes and followed his grandfather deeper into the forest's strange embrace. They were traversing what felt like another dimension on the Citadel. 

“[...This petri dish—this gutter of the Citadel—it’s as safe as it’s “contained”. By design, there's a lot of competition for sunlight and other nutrients. These species have to adapt to find their place in the ecosystem...it’s natural selection at its darkest].” 

"[Aw jeez, is that why the plants are all glowing?]"

The teen looked up from his footsteps, through the glass casing of his helmet to the curved and slightly hunched shape of the man ahead of him who rarely looked back. 

“[Yep. A little bit of radioactive waste. A lot less sunlight... Creates the perfect recipe for photosynthetic bioluminescence].” Rick meandered through the glowing foliage, offering Morty a verbal glimpse into his mind. He noted the teen’s blank stare of admiration and clarified as his own eyes glinted—imbued with lucid awareness in the low-light. “[It means, th-they can more efficiently absorb different light waves. It’s _ literally _toxic...but not so irredeemable that extremophile fungi can’t convert it back into the basic ass building blocks of life. The fungi use radiation as a source of energy, much like Earth plants use light. There and here on the Citadel, our best antibiotics still come from this shit].” 

“[—Oh jeez, watch out Rick!]” 

Rick pushed aside hanging streams of glowing pitcher-shaped flowers, and they spilled bright blue liquid as they tilted to the side. Morty shuddered as traces fell onto the wholly unconcerned scientist's lab coat. His eyes flicked to the glowing liquid, revealing only a mild annoyance. 

“[I’m as toxic as this ecosystem, Morty—uranium-powered cellular matrix in my cybernetics—I’d probably find a more curable form of cancer in this contaminated wasteland. Wh-why do you think my lab coat is lined with lead]?” Rick waited for a response from Morty, and when the teen didn’t answer, he provided one, ‘[It’s more for your sake than mine].” 

Morty could practically feel the scientist’s smirk beneath the respirator as Morty mentally caught up, sharing the summary of these thoughts with an overwhelmed_ Aw Jeez. _

That explained why it was so heavy, and why the scientist didn’t limit the fashion statement to his lab. Rick’s voice trailed into a teasing laugh, cutting into the safety of Morty’s protective suit once more. 

“[It’s why I didn’t bother with the Breaking Bad getup]."

In demonstration, Rick held his hand beneath the ambient light of the plants, and his veins responded by illuminating bright green beneath their charged glow. The effect reminded Morty of seeing bright colors eerily glow beneath a black light, and his stomach coiled at the strange reality of the organic, glowing matter that was Rick’s blood, pulsing in real-time. 

Tubular tentacle-like structures spun out of the plant’s stem, the hairs glistened with a thick gooey substance as the filaments reached for Rick’s hand.

"[I-I thought you said they weren't alive?]"

Rick snickered at Morty’s expression, pulling his hand out of the plant’s reach and back into the safety of his personal space.

"[No, I said they weren't _human,_ as in they don’t have the capacity for the empathy you keep trying to project onto them]." 

Rick kicked his loafer into the ground testing the path, before changing their course once again. 

"[If they _ kill you _ it’s not personal. Just survival. 'N' from that lens? These plants are as indifferent to your existence as the surrounding cosmos—a-at least until they need you to survive—]."

“[What about you, Rick—What about the other way around? Could these plants catch something—some kind of disease from you?]”

“[Sounds like that’s not my problem, Morty].”

Without warning Rick halted, and reached into the inner lining of his lab coat, searching. His breath fell heavy through the ventilator mask as he turned toward Morty and spoke in a sudden tone of warning. “[There’s a lot of rouge electrons in this area. Our communications might drop out. You remember the hand signals]?” 

Rick waited patiently for Morty to respond. He nodded, then signaled a yes, and satisfied, Rick reached out a gloved hand squeezing his coiled fingers around Morty’s arm with unspoken thoughts. Even behind the foreign mask, Morty could see the concern in his grandfather’s features. 

Before Morty could say anything, Rick reached out, and playfully rapped his knuckles on the teen’s helmet. 

“[From here on out I need you to stay focused. Keep your eyes on me, and follow my footsteps _ exactly _].” 

“[Oh—Okay, Rick],” Morty’s voice fell quiet as he held his grandfather’s gaze yearning for human contact without the barriers between them. “[Aw Jeez, I don’t know if we should be here].”

“[Desperate times call for desperate measures, Morty. You wanted to go home? I can't just shoot a portal out of my ass. This is our best shot at finding the right materials to work with. There’s no going back.]"

Breathless, Morty held his grandfather’s gaze in the electric atmosphere and felt the hairs on his arms prickle. Rick’s eyes manifested with an indispensable quality from the dense unknown of the surrounding alien world. Their intrinsic nature, catalyzed against such an environment; an unknown blue element in the older man’s gaze stirred to life with the same effulgent intensity of radioactive organisms. 

Morty swallowed and nodded. “[Okay, Rick. Let’s keep going].”

The scientist turned, raising a radio-like device in front of himself, and pointing the metal antenna as if it were a compass. The instrument whirred like a growing siren, and without hesitation, Rick moved in the direction that registered the loudest, changing their course.

"[If it’s not naturally occurring out here, I guarantee some Rick’s been stupid enough to dump 317 or even 465 out here...just gotta find it...gotta know where to look—If you see anything that looks like eggs—I-I know I told you to be careful—but don't shy away from it, give it a shake… If you can find the right buyer, those facehuggers are worth more than my lab].”

With every fiber of his being, Rick understood where his place in the universe was. He strode indifferently through the flourishing spectrum of life without a second glance, moving through his world in the same way he had always moved beside the teen.

The individual plant lives, however, like Morty, were hyper-aware of the older man’s ethereal presence. Mushrooms crowded in clusters at Rick’s feet, either bending away from his presence or reaching out to collect the particles of dirt from his feet; tokens of affection as he moved over them. Patches of moss removed itself from his path, while stems of flowering bulbs, glowed brighter as they rotated in yearning after the radioactive scent of his trailing lab coat. 

The fuzzy star-like flickering of fireflies winked in and out of existence, as the insects were left unsettled by his presence; Rick’s determined trajectory continued to pull them into the current of his orbit, casting them into the sky with a fervid glow. 

Morty sighed in awe and returned his gaze to his grandfather, studying the line of the scientist’s back as he watched the older man’s fearless preternatural movements—transfixed by the knowledge that something so beautiful in the universe could also be so dangerous. 

Rick was naturally as terrifying as the forest.

Morty placed his weight onto a piece of wood, and the pulpy carcass gave beneath him tossing a thrush of dust and spores into the air. The enveloping atmosphere grew thick around them, and Morty found himself stepping closer to Rick. Slowly, it grew sinister, swallowing them into the forest’s tangled heart of darkness. 

“[R̷i̷c̴k̶.̴ ̸W̶-wa̶i̴t̵ ̶u̷p̴!̷]!” 

Before long, Morty could barely register where he was walking. He inched forward, stretching his arms in front of him like a pair of antennae, feeling his way forward. He clutched onto the scientist’s lab coat in sudden panic, and Rick’s body jerked in surprise before a voice hissed into the teen’s helmet. 

“[T̴u̸r̴n̸ ̶o̶n̷ ̷t̶h̸e̵ ̴r̷e̴d̵s̸h̵i̴f̶t̵ ̴v̴i̸s̸i̶o̶n̶ ̵i̵n̶ ̷y̵o̶u̴r̴ ̴s̸u̴i̶t̷].” The static voice brushed into Morty’s receiver, and the teen looked up to discover the glowing red ember of Rick’s cybernetic eye. It steadily burned through the darkness gazing at his grandson in impatient silence.

Morty lifted searching hands to locate the button on his helmet. With a sigh of relief, he pressed the toggle switch, glancing around the forest as the spectrum of colors bled into cautionary waves of red. 

Various populations of fungi had overgrown the environment, entirely covering the base of the trees, and blooming into spiraling semi-transparent fans that reached around the hollowed trunks. Giant columns of mushrooms towered and hung overhead, glowing like street lamps behind layers of fungal lace. The vein of fireflies continued to pulse above them. 

Morty studied the display, wondering at what point the trees ended and the fungus began. If they had become an entirely new species altogether. His eyes skimmed the environment remembering their original mission, and sighed. 

“[How do we find what we’re looking for, Rick]?”

“[B̸̡̨̢̙͙͉̩͓̞̥̪͓̰̻̅̆͌̄͂͑͋̈͐̎̂̃́͘e̸̼͙̱̬̟̬̱̦͓̺͑̐̂̿̑c̵̛̫̺͍͖̹̹̻̽͛͌̒̌͐̐̑̅̓̚ą̸̹̰̳̖̲͓̹̳͓̒͋̌́͊͠ư̵̬͕̖̙̻̥̎̆s̷̝̘̟̎͗̽̀̔̌̓̄̏͌̊̕͜ę̴̨̲̗̫̼̺͖̩̹̹̇̒̊͗̂͑̑̏͒̀̓̚ ̶͓̅̔̕w̵͚͚̻͕̻̗͒́̈́̉̾̚ę̶͖͔̖͉̣̰̦̟͂͐̒̓͑'̸̝̤̩̰͍͓̞̑̏̽͂̽̉͠͠͝ȓ̷̨̨̛̛̩̖̞̜̻͍̯̱̭͖͗̀̆͐̅̆̓̽͝ͅẹ̶̠̯͚̗̈̓͐͜ ̴͇̲̠̹͈̺̻͙͚̟̏͐̀̈́̃̈́͘͠ų̵̫̞̖̖̦̣̟̈́̒̓̿́̍̀̉̓͒̆͌͐́͝s̶̨̼͙̱̯͙̠̜̞̬̻͍̜͗̂̓̄͋̕̕͜͠ì̸̩͕̠͙̖̜̖͌̿̄͒̾̍̆̃̋̈́̽͜͝n̶̘̥͑̍̑͂̕̚͠ģ̷̢̢̣̮̠̺͈̲̝̄̃ ̷̩̔̐ä̴̡̛͚̻̺̜̰̰͓̙̜̓͗̒̂̄̍̍͆̈̆͠͝͝ ̵͚̥͎͇̦̥̙͉͇̥̺̹̏̒̑̒̃s̸̛̙̟̰͍͎̘͉̣̜̗̣̈́̓̆̃̈̊́̋͜͝i̵̧̹̖̖͕͕͚̹̻̞̟̻̽͂̎̔̄̀͒͐̒̚͝͝ẋ̸̨̛̺̰̱̗̜̩̗̭͖͈ͅt̴͛͛̈́͒̿͗̉͜h̷̢̛͖͙͈̹͎͉͖̞͕̱̭̒̄͒̓̄̎̈́̒̐͌̋̕͘ ̷̨̧̛̟̳̱̤̥̪̭̎̊͆̎̾͑̍̓͝ͅs̷̜̣̾̂̆ȅ̵̫̥̣̭̝͖̜̼̱̪͍̱̫͙̞̊̉̃̌̎̓͒͐n̸̡̡̨͇͓͎̻͊̄̉̊̂͒̈͛̎̕̚s̸̡͓̱͎͇̠̬̝̦̉̍̓͑͋̈́͘͠͝ͅę̷̠̘͍̻̫̘̦̻̹͆͛̏͘ ̶̡̯͓̺̈̿̂͗̊̍̓͂͑̓̅͒͝c̸̖͈̠̮̘̺̱̪͐̍̌͊͑̾́̐̔̉̏͜͝͠a̷̛̮̬̥̪̳͈͙̽̄̀͂̓̽͊̆̕l̸̢̨̠̰͈̖̣̞͙̹̉͗̉͌̽͒͒̈́̄͊l̵̗̰̹̲̙̝͛̍́̍͆̚ͅe̴͚̭͓̓͆͌͛̐̐̇̓͠d̷̨̢̛̪̲̝̲̜̪͍̘̲̈̒̏̂̊̽͆̉̕̚ͅ Sc̷̜̓̓͋̀̕i̸̢̛̭̅̈́̈́̐̈́͗̽͂̉͠ͅė̸̱̰̮̠̆͑̋̒n̴̢̥̖̮̜̰̗̳̤̊̌̈́͌͊̾̇̍̃̌c̷̢̧̠̹̘̻͔̠͋̆̑̊̊͂͐̌̔̓̕͝ȩ̵̥̪̹͕̹̜̣̣͕͍̲̮̫̾̑̏̃̎̈͗̓͑͝,̴̧̟̤̝̠͕̳̝͓̜͖͖̺͐̋̉͂͋̃͐ ̴͔̘̳̜̫͊̒M̸̳͕̲͈͉̞̼̝̺̑͐̊̌ͅǫ̴̢͍̙͑̊̾͐̉̓̽̃͗͝r̷̰̳͓̫̝͍͐̓̏̄̂̊̽̂̚͘ṭ̷̦͍̀̏͋̉̏͊y̸̛̲͊.̷̬̯͍̱̟̯̟̻͇̍͒̇̒̕̕ ]” 

The static around Rick’s voice had grown thicker, and Morty only caught fragments of the once-familiar sound. Suddenly isolated, panic encroached his chest. Morty was cut off from the only connection in this forest his survival depended on. His self-preservation mechanisms kicked in, and Morty’s senses sharpened, feeling as if the forest was closing in around him. He took a few deep breaths to calm himself, listening to the pulse of his own blood. Feeling claustrophobic, he moved forward in silent observation, hyper-focused on keeping Rick in his line of sight. 

The undergrowth grew dense with decomposing debris and mud that seemed to glue Morty to the forest floor. The soggy matter squelched beneath Morty’s heavy footsteps as the dead and decaying foliage continued to encroach the trail as it tapered into nothing. Vines and branches clung to Morty’s suit as he struggled to forge a path behind his grandfather.

A warm blush flourished across Morty’s cheeks as he grew hyper-aware of the older man’s staticky breath quietly dragging in his ear as he exerted himself. The teen’s heart raced when he became certain that Rick, in turn, was listening to the teen’s. The rhythmic ebb and flow were strangely intimate. Moving through the void-like darkness, it was easy to pretend that they were alone in the universe, together. Connected by a seemingly invisible thread of human life. Morty reassured himself. They were still connected. 

“[Hey uh, Grandpa Rick]?” 

“[I̵̢̡̧̢̩̞̤̹͈̿ ̶͖̜̞̮͗̍̈́̓̃́͐͝h̴̛̝̞̽̉̓̄͝͝ä̵̤͕͕̖́ͅv̸̻̦͕̪͚̗̍̈́̈́͑̀̑͘e̶͇̫̤̝͈̹̮̱͛̾͊̂̚ ̵̧͖̠̌̒͗̕ṉ̴̨̡͓̘̂̀̾̐̅͜͠o̵̳̞̐̓̽̍ ̷̢̜͕̝̣̞̙̳̈́̏̆̅i̴͓̥̱̟͑͋̃͝d̶̺̰̩̾̀͑̍̍̓͝͠e̴̛̫̗̳̞̜͗͌͜͜a̵̢̛̰͔̤̮͓̭͊͂͒̐̓̍͘͠ ̶̡̪̙̯͔͌̐̂͘͝͝w̶̜̍̆͘̚ḣ̶̛̪͉̣̽͛̓͊͒͋ǎ̷̫̪̭̥̺̱̙͚͓̎̅̄̃̋̅͌̕t̷̲̗̜̦̗͓̦͓̭̑̒̿̈́̊̉ ̵̜̖̙̪͉̐̔ÿ̴͔́̄̉ỏ̷̺͊̄̚ũ̷͙̙̣͓̩̓'̸̡͊̊̓̎̈͂̐͝r̶͍̮̰͈̖̝͍̣͒̄̌͜͝e̸̛̥̙͂̄ ̴͙̤̮̈́̍̃̓̿s̶͕̣͔̣̯̟̘̠̔̈̋̐̽̚a̶͙̲̍̄̄͌͌y̴̨̩̲̜̬̍̋̏̕i̶̛̙͉̠̳̓̉̓̄̈́̒ņ̴͚̭̻̹̗̏̂̎͂g̵̛̝̬͎̾̾́̽].”

In response to Morty’s indecipherable words, Rick’s pace slowed to ensure Morty remained at arm’s reach. Morty’s pulse quickened as the threat of danger was quantified by the scientist’s careful actions. It was in the most dangerous situations, that Rick revealed to Morty how much he truly cared. They shuffled a few more feet forward, and Rick revealed the tracking device once more from his lab coat. Against the red tones, it clicked and blared louder. Morty clung to Rick’s sleeve. 

“[Can I… Can I uh, tell you something important, Rick?].” 

“[M̷̟̹̱͎̔̈́o̸̢̨̱̘̦̣̩͇̫͎̯̠̻̣͗͂̃͒̇̓̽̓͂̆͛͜͝͝͠ṛ̸̢̨̨̛̻̳̙͖̜̭̹̩͖̗̃̌͋̉͝ṱ̴̨̧̡̝̙̬̭̙͉̫̉̈́̉̈́̓̈́̇ỷ̸̛͖͔̹̰̲̜̏́̔̍̋͑͑͐̍͆̚͝,̵̫̫̼̰͚̹̩̙̺̀̾̏͘ ̶̧̛̝̬͛̆̿͊͂͑̑ÿ̶̛̳͚̪̠̲́̐̊̀͒͌͐͑̃̊̕ǫ̶̙̠̞̤͓̥̪̓̀͌̓̋̂̆̃͐͘̕͝ǔ̷̡̡̧̡̡̝̙̞͓̠̥̞̲͂̓͗̈̓̄̋͌͘̕͘ͅ ̸͈͓̠̌͗̑̊̂̀͂̎͝͝ḑ̴͇̙̗̪͉̤̩̦̦͚̿̀̈́ͅú̷̧̞̦͕̱̬͔͖̖͖̳͊͛͝m̶̧̪̟̝̮͌̐͛̍̐̋̂̕͜b̵̡̛̯̘̦͖̋̆̎̈́̅̋̇͌̕͝ ̵̳̯̳̘̤̊̏̿̓̆̈́̈́͝s̴̨̩̙͎͚̹̖̳͍̱̝̦̙̲͒̓̕͜͝h̵̹̣̬̫͖͆̀̒̈́̇͌̏̂̈́̑̔͆͠͠ȉ̸̢̦͕͔̲̤̬̱́̓̈́̽̊̈́̿́̇̑̈́͝͠ţ̸̧͕̻̰͉̯̫̦̯̙̞̮̩̊̃͗͒̿̄̏̕,̴̧̞̗̰̭̥̿͜ ̴̥̱̻̞̖͙͂͑Ȋ̴̟̲̘̟̯̮̫͉̑̋͒̿͗̓̏̈́͆̽͜ ̷̧̪̹̞̱͙̑̓̚ͅç̶̨̹͖͉̝̮͎̌̈̓͊̅́̍̆̐̄͂̇̾̂̃a̶̧̙̞̰̱̭̯̮͒͂n̴̢̯̙̲̘̻͕̎̾̿͐͗͘'̷̡̡̱̲͕̘̰̜̉̈́̿̅̋͒̒̇̒̀͠͝ţ̴̢̞͈͎̼̣͖͔̤͉̺͉͖͖̄ ̸̧̢̻̫̲͈̝̜͇͚̓͆̍͒̏͊̈́͗͝ḧ̴̢̛̛̙̳͉̓̅͗̐̐̐̌̑ë̵̡͇̣̳̫̹͇̦́̿̈́̆̕͘̕͜͝ͅā̷̡̱̱̞̪͕͚̇͆͘ͅͅr̶̤̦̪̪̽̈́̂̋̒̊͝͝ͅ ̴̦̳͍̅͑͑͋̽̈́̓̏͛̏͝͝͠͠a̶̢̧̢̹͖̩̲̰̟͓͝ ̴̡̨͓̰̥̥̼̱̞̪̬̣͎̑w̶̛̛̳͒̿́̆̀̀̈́̾̓ơ̴̖͚̻̓r̴̞̣̘̬̩̗̱̗̼̓͒̇̈́͝ḏ̷̡̨̠͙̙͔͎̱͙͈̹̬̓̑͝ ̷̧̧̡̱̬͉̹͓̻̳͉͔͕͊̎̋͛̄͊͋͑͒͐̔͜ͅÿ̴̺̗̯̹̟̣̹̖̟̫̮́̓̍̇̒̌̍͌̈́͘͘ơ̴̛̛̬̝̈͒̓̏̾ư̶̛̖̦͑͗̑̈̓͛'̴͕̦͍͍̱͎͉̮̳͇̿̌̈́̓̐̏͛͑͒r̴̡͈̙̼̹̘̥̳̮̬̖̓̈́͂̏̔̃̊͝ḙ̵̗̘̗̍̃̓̕ ̵̖̭̱͖̈̏̈̑͠s̴̡̨̛͓͔͔̱̈̿̾͌͛a̴̡̨̨̢̮̺̙̲̘͎͙͒̇ỳ̸̧̭̭̖͕͂͑͆̈́i̸̥͋̌̅̏̕n̷̛̺̫̍͆̍̉͐͗̃̾̌́̃̀̽̅g̸̛̳͆̀͋͐̏̓̊̌̔̉͑͠.̴̧͕͇͉̭̩͇͓͆̀͐͗̋̌́͂̇]”

“[I didn’t think I was one of those Mortys… The kind who—but I think I am.]” Morty listened to the sound of his own voice as he confessed into the wall of static. He felt a moment of relief, even if his words would remain unheard.

“[M̴̨̨̖̳̤̙̝̺̼͋̒̑̓̚͘o̴̫̳̣̙̺̓̓̓͗̾͘r̴̜̪̱̆̔̈͝͝t̷̻̓͛̂̃̈́̈́̽͝y̶͖̘̓͛͗.̷̜͌͒̏̅͘͝͠ ̸̡̛̪͚͚̗̗̤̈́͑͒͑͛͋͘ͅỊ̶̡̗͎͉̪͎́̈̾̽̈́̍̀͝ͅt̸͇̺̪͕̼͙̠͑̽̋'̶̧̠̻̩̗̥͖̭̐̂ș̸̢͔̝̟̈̂͛͋͑͐͑̊͝ ̶̡̥̣̰̾͋̊́̓̈̆̏̋p̶̛͎̼̟͑̅̍̓͆̂͠o̴̙̻̲̽͐̀̌į̴̙͓͓̑͊̓͜n̸͔͙͙͔̜͂͗̎̚͜͜ͅt̵̡̠̪̮͍̳̟̘̊̈́l̴̝̀͠ē̵̛͓̜̻̹͑͌̈́̇͝s̷̡̜͎̥̱͉̀̊̌̇͂̄̐̓̕s̷̛͕̗̤̗̬̿̏͋̈́̀̕͜.̸̢̟͍̰̗̺̥̫̂͌̽̌͐͑̐̚͜ ̴̛̛̱̮̦̯̩̆̀̽̋̃͆Ą̷̢̜̳͈͙̣͗̿͂̄̓̋͐̚ḻ̴̯̩͖̱̺͎̂̋̓͋͝l̵͙̟̮̲͎̽͋̍̍̇̑͌ͅ ̴̧̡̛̰̜͕͈̬̔̄͠Î̴̢̛͕̘͉̠̘̰̯̔̐̓͌̈̉̕ͅ'̸͙͋m̴̢̬͓̓̐ ̵̜̝͇̭̪̽̓̄g̸̢̮̻͊́̈́͆ę̶͈̳̲̫̜̫̤̲̒ť̵͍̬͖̥̃̍͊̀̏͒͠t̸̢̂̄͋i̵͙͋̉̏͘n̴̲̲̒ĝ̵͚̓̉̈́̃͑̎̀ ̸̧͙͙̣̺͇͆i̶͈͂̇͌̌͗̔̾̕͠ş̷̡̭̙͍͚͙͌̃͐̔̍̇̽͂͝ͅͅ ̵̡̟͍̳̖̫̫̲̊̌͊͒͜͝͠ṡ̷̻̲̪͋̈́͑̔͌͛̾̕ṭ̸̨͊̓a̶̡̤̳͒͛͊̓͌t̸͈̟͍͓̟̘͓̜̹́̑́̓͠i̶̢̗̖͈̱̦̻̐̔̚c̸̞̯͚̘̗̲͋͛̕͜͝.̷͍̝̙̣̩̭͚͛̅̃̀̋̕ͅ ̸̡̠̙̝͑͝S̸̛͇̣̮̱̖̬̖̣̹̏͐̊̉̽͠͝t̵̢̬̙̼̘͚͌̿a̵̼̟͒̂͆́͑̔̃͝͝ÿ̶̡̫̘̟̩̬̠́ ̶̲͓̩̮̩̯͍̤̱̄̿̆͠͝F̴̢̨̰̭̆̌̊̌̾͂̚͜͠ǒ̶̡̰̲̮̤͕̼͔̜̽͂͗̋̾̊̑͝c̷̢̮̬͚̻̣̮̙̄̌̐̊ǘ̸͍̺͙̫̩̃̃̓̉̚̚̕ͅş̵̰͚̣͊̉̐̐̑͑͆ȩ̴̘͇͈́̓̌̎͋͗̿̊d̴̳͕̯̤͔̈́͋̂̈́.̵̦̳̒͘͠͝]”

“[I've felt that way for a while now, Grandpa Rick]." Morty hadn’t wanted anything to change, but with each day, it was becoming more and more obvious that he’d already changed. 

It was why they were on this adventure. He needed to go back home. 

Morty’s lip trembled at the imagined response, and his grandfather caught the teen’s downcast expression. He pressed his mask against the temple of Morty’s helmet, cutting through the barrier of white noise, “[H̵e̷y̶ ̷k̶i̷d̸d̶o̵,̶ ̶k̶e̸e̸p̷ ̴y̶o̶u̸r̶ ̵h̷e̵a̴d̴ ̶u̶p̵,̵ ̸w̴e̶'̶r̸e̷ ̵a̴l̵m̴o̷s̸t̵ ̸t̵h̴e̴r̴e̷.̸]” 

Morty looked up to his grandfather, through the invisible wall of unspoken things between them, and nodded. The personal protective gear fitted itself around his body and the sounds of oxygen compressed hissing quietly in the background of his suit. Morty took a deep stabilizing breath: stale. Manufactured. Comfortingly safe. 

Quarantined from the man who was as dangerous as the surrounding forest. 

Rick extended his free hand outward, holding the device which was now fully registering. Lights pulsed as the instrument incessantly blared in a warning. Rick paced a few circles, stepping over a line of glowing green mushrooms before sinking into a squat. He pocketed the radioactive metal detector into his lab coat before digging into the moist soil with a pair of metal tongs.

“[F̶̞̰̈́ũ̴̗̥͑c̶̪̈k̶̢̈ ̶̺̫̾͝y̵̦̖͋̚e̵͈̽̚ȃ̵̯̱͊ḩ̷̟͑̚,̷̥̀̄ ̶̦̾͝b̵̲̏â̷̤͍̄ḃ̸̦̭ẙ̴̜̔!̴͔̽]”

He lifted the small glowing rock into the air for Morty to see, revealing a glass tube from his pocket to store it in. It hovered in the glass as large metal lids and panels vacuum sealed the opening. After a moment the panels lit up; the rock was powering its own device of containment. Rick gazed at the radioactive material in a way that he would never look at Morty, and the teen stared with envy at the familiar isotope that had gifted the multiverse to the scientist.

“[T̴͈̭́a̵̬̹̚k̷̤̘̑e̴͙ ̴̦͠ạ̴͘͜ ̸̟̝̈̕g̷͉͛̿ȍ̸͎̱̉o̴͈̝̒̍d̷̦̏̍ ̶̛̙̥̓l̶͓̏͘o̸̅͜o̴̦͆̿k̶̜̏ ̷̬̽a̴̦̒ř̶͖͜o̵̢̥͌͠u̶͎̮̓n̴̰̊d̶̛͜ ̸̣͐h̶̨̍ẹ̵̽͝r̸̘̉ḛ̴͇̈,̵͖̂ ̴͈̅M̷̳͘o̵͇͎͊r̷̬͛t̶̟̎͗y̴͕͒̇,̸̧̰̒ ̷̧̻̑â̷͉̽n̸̛͙̏d̵̲̀ ̸͇̰̉͝s̷̡̏ͅö̷̮̦́̍å̷̡͈k̵̢̼̉͠ ̶̩̽i̵̛͓͇͝t̴̟̾̌ ̶̻͒ḭ̷̜̿n̵̰͉͂,̵̙̉ ̶̮͊b̴͚̝̈́͌e̵̡͋͜c̸͓͖͝ȧ̴̡̹ȕ̴̬̪s̴͎̔ĕ̷͈,̶͔̍̀ ̵͉̅ỵ̸͂o̵̦͉̽u̶̺̒̕ ̶̲͝k̵̯͐n̷̨̙͛̆o̸̬͐w̵̪̟̉ ̴̡̉̈́y̸̻̼̑̏o̴͕͛̚ư̵̝̗̍’̶̖̮͐̉r̶̩͗̕ͅe̷̡̱͐ ̴̦̗͌̈́p̵̟̲̓͠r̶̝̋ǫ̴͈͌b̵̜̤̌a̷͚̾b̶̟̒l̶̘̰̐͋y̸̠͔̒ ̶̝̮̎̒ň̷̳̽e̷̼̍͝ͅv̷͚̱̂è̴̡̫ṙ̷̻ ̷̦̰̂̚ḡ̴̢̯o̸͔͚̕n̷̡͂̅n̵̼͗͜a̸̢̤̿ ̸̙͌̚s̸̜̓̏ͅe̷͜e̴̥͋̊ ̴͕͓̍t̴̖̕̚h̵̤̀̄į̷̈s̴̡ ̵̪̎p̶̨͎̆́ḻ̶̛̙á̸̩͌c̶̟̝͛ę̸̝̓ ̵̗͂ȧ̸̘͔g̴͎̓̾a̵̫̽̅ȋ̴̭̏n̸̠̓͠.̸̺̓]”

“[Let’s—Let’s just go].” Suddenly in a bad mood, Morty frowned. He looked over his shoulder, ready to leave. 

Rick sifted through the foliage and dirt for a few more moments, unsatisfied, and Morty’s frown shifted into concern. Hadn’t they found what they were looking for? Rick’s body fell calculatingly still for a moment before he rose in slow unhesitating motion. He lifted his sleeve, glancing at one of the many time-keeping and measuring devices strapped to his arm. With a sudden turn of his heels, the older man set the course to retrace their steps motioning for Morty to follow. 

“[C̴̬̀̈́'̸̗͑̈́m̶̫̹͛ȯ̵͎̬̍n̶̲̂͘,̶̭̱̆͌ ̶̦̞̃̋M̵̥̊o̶̲̊͊͜r̷̲̄͠t̸̪̠̒y̸͖̋̕,̶̗̣̏̕ ̸̢̼̏͌w̵͚̓ē̴̱͉-̶͚͛-̷͉̲̍͗w̷͖̽̊ḛ̷̦̈̓ ̸̢̀g̸̠̘̅͗o̷̢̨̒ṭ̷̬̅t̷̩͠a̴̯̻̾͝ ̴̟̥̍h̶̘̗̓̅e̴͓͙͛à̶̭́d̷̮̍͠ ̷̗̼b̷̭̻̓â̶̩̰͝c̸͕̈k̶͔̎.̵͎͓̈́̆]” 

Morty could barely hear his Grandfather’s words, but he understood the gesture. He signaled that he understood, and hurried behind him. Slowly, they made their way back out to the less threatening parts of the forest. Rick looked back to Morty with a triumphant smile as visible light returned to the atmosphere. 

The glowing red light of his cybernetic eye had shifted back into something more human as he cocked his head toward the clearing from which they had entered. Morty passed beneath Rick’s arm as the scientist pulled a mass of vines and leaves aside to make a path for the teen. He stepped beneath the beams of light, reminding himself that it was still daylight above the dark purple and blue-hued canopy overhead, and marveled at the patterns of nature. Matter wove itself into life: a single cell, which became strings, then chains before blooming into universal networks. The pattern swelled from tree to tree, branching into the endless sky, while below, the threads of fungus wove themselves into thick patches on the forest floor. 

The same patterns of life existed throughout everything. 

Morty had always felt connected to all biological lifeforms, but none were more closely felt by the teen than the lurid existence that had woven itself around him and stepped onto the path ahead. He swelled with pride at the knowledge that he was_ Rick Sanchez’s _grandson, and for better or worse, Morty would carry the scientist’s legacy forward. 

Rick moved beneath the crepuscular rays of light, immersed in an atmospheric sheen of dewy blue ambiance, and the strange world framed Rick’s silhouetted form _ just so _as spores gently floated around him through the windless air. 

“[It’s almost romantic here…]” Morty’s voice fell quiet as his chest ached in silence. Rick’s voice responded, familiar and clear. He chuckled, looking back over his shoulder, before climbing through a fresh tangle of vines.

“[Yeah, well, if you get contaminated by any of this shit, I’m gonna be digging around in your insides, and trust me, that’s not gonna be a very romantic setting].” 

Morty hadn’t realized the static in their communication had ebbed. He hoped the blush creeping over his cheeks wasn’t visible through the yellow-hued light of the helmet that encased him. He sputtered out in panic, trying to recover from the too revealing statement. 

“[I meant—I just uh… This place. I always thought it was a… a kind of romantic idea, I guess…like giving back to nature in a way. Y’know cause you die, and the energy in your body. It goes back to the Earth, and new life can flourish from it—cir-circle of life].” 

"[Je~ezus]," Rick disapprovingly lamented, before following up with an unimpressed tone of sarcasm, ‘[yeah. That sounds like a real… symbiotic exchange, Morty. You’re a regular dendrophile.]"

Blood rushed to Morty’s face in embarrassment as Rick poked around the pockets in his lab coat, searching for his flask. 

"[—But there’s no mutually beneficial exchange involved here, Morty. You'd be nothing more than a resource to these astrobiological organisms, and the altruism of your_ tender little cosmic heart _ isn’t going to impress them. Trust me, if there’re Ricks and Mortys out here rotting in this _ circle of life—_],” extending his flask, Rick gestured in a toast to the surrounding Citadel, “[—_offering themselves to the universe —_it’s by self-delusional choice. Suicide]."

Rick gave a quick shake to determine the amount of liquid remaining in his flask before flipping his mask downward, against Morty’s protests. 

“[Relax, Morty],” Rick smiled, flashing the teen a smirk in turn, before uncapping the flask, “[I’m not breathing in anything toxigenic out here].”

“[Then why—!]”

“[—You ever get this shit lodged in your lung? I already have the hardest working liver in the galaxy. Don’t need to push my luck with a case of spore lung].”

Morty held his tongue, thankful that Rick was not as drunk as he usually was when they went out. Rick nursed the lip of his flask as he calculatingly stared toward the streaks of light falling through the trees, and Morty studied Rick’s silent thoughts, recognizing that the light had significantly faded since they’d first arrived. Morty returned his gaze to Rick. He could see the various scenarios playing across his expressions in silent deliberation. 

“[C’mon].” Rick pocketed his flask before returning his forearm to his mouth to wipe away the accumulated body fluid. He re-adjusted his ventilator mask, returning to their exit strategy. 

As they neared the edge of the forest, Morty could see the curving dome of the Citadel sky, fading into artificial twilight. They approached the same semi-transparent barrier that they had entered through, and Morty shivered at the remembrance. It was gooey; thick with a viscous texture. Morty could only imagine that it felt slimy as well. Rick had called it a selectively permeable membrane before informing him that they were breaking a number of Citadel laws just by passing through it. 

Before Morty could psych himself out to move through it, a pair of hands shoved him through, sending Morty tumbling on the other side. Rick casually followed him, reaching a hand to help him back up on the other side. 

“[Don’t think about it].” 

Rick motioned for Morty to remove his helmet. The teen held his breath as he lifted the protective helmet from his head. Chunks of sludgy membrane excess slipped into the opening as a shock of cold air forced its way into the released seams. Morty shuddered at the contact. 

The air was moist, and it pungently wafted over his senses. The pulpy smell of the forest, even on the other side of the membrane was all at once familiar, and foreign. Rick was tossing his slime-covered arm in the distance, trying to fling the contents from his body. He dredged off a chunk of the pink and blue matter into a small vile, then laughed, throwing a handful at his grandson. 

Overwhelmed by reaching the finish line of their adventure, Morty joined in, throwing some of the membrane back. 

The sky darkened to bathe the world in cooler hues, and the forest’s membrane hardened. Rick’s laughter died as he cut their fun short. 

“Listen to me Morty, get your clothes off. We gotta decontaminate—get rid of all the external radiation particles.” 

Morty kicked himself out of his suit, grateful to hear Rick’s voice, unfiltered. Rick grabbed Morty’s clothes from the teen’s hand as he passed them over, tossing them into a pile alongside the biohazard suit, and Rick’s own clothing. 

The older man searched a nearby bush, revealing a sealed tote. He opened it with a maniacal laugh, sifting through the contents. Morty swallowed in relief, hoping that they wouldn’t have to do the walk of shame all the way back to their condo.

Naked, the scientist displayed a large bag of fluid with a sprinkler nozzle. He tossed a bar of glowing soap to Morty. 

“C’mon, Morty. Lather up real quick ‘n’ get in the shower. Twenty seconds. In ‘n’ out. Just enough to get wet.”

“Aw Jeez, Grandpa Rick—” 

“There’s no time, Morty. Y-y-you gotta trust me.”

Morty acquiesced, stepping beneath the nozzle and wetting the glowing bar of soap. With a cold and clinical gaze, Rick watched Morty’s movements as he instructed the teen to scrub down every part of his body with the substance that wasn’t completely water. 

He avoided eye contact, trying to calm the inevitable confused arousal of their naked bodies being in close proximity. He felt the scientist’s body heat, and his eyes flicked to the fleshy hanging folds of skin that once used to be his grandfather's ass. His swaggly old-man-balls hung lower than his penis; longer than the length of his entire hand. Like overripe fruit. _ Fuck _. Morty snapped his attention to the ground, pretending to wash his partial erection. 

That wasn’t supposed to be arousing. 

Morty hurried away from the portable shower, shivering and thankful for the cool evening air. Rick pulled the nozzle over himself and Morty turned his body away to give the older man some privacy, only occasionally looking over his shoulder and immediately regretting it. He focused his gaze on the now glowing membrane of the forest. 

He’d been thankful for the adventure that they’d had. Suddenly Rick grabbed Morty’s shoulders and leaned over them with narrowed eyes. 

“Hold still, Morty.” His voice reverberated in Morty’s ear and he shuddered at the sudden contact. The teen felt the heat from his grandfather’s body and swallowed nervously, replaying the words, and the various meanings within them. 

A sharp pain bit into his arm, and Morty jerked his head to the side.

“—Ow! What the—Grandpa Rick, wh-what the fuck!?” 

A multi-pronged needle had been submerged into his upper arm without warning: it drew a large vial of blood while replacing the fluid with a glowing blue serum that burned then cooled its way into Morty’s veins. Morty bit his lip, angry at his own returning arousal for betraying him. 

“Just some boosters, binders and laxatives.” Rick didn’t apologize. “Can’t be too careful, and I promise whatever shit you’ll take in the next few hours thanks to these babies is gonna be a hell of a lot better than any kind of intestinal infection.” 

Rick pulled the needles away and Morty pressed against the swollen bump, flinching at the tender site. The cut immediately healed itself, and Morty frowned, snatching his reward: an offered fresh change of clothes away from his grandfather’s hand. 

“Rick you can’t just—a little warning would’ve y’know. Would’ve been nice.” 

Rick rolled his eyes. “If it wasn’t already obvious after taking a gander through _ that _forest, Morty, the concept of consent doesn’t exactly exist for you out here.” 

In a gesture of solidarity, Rick injected himself with a second vial, and Morty’s eyes narrowed at the display. Anger placated into a misplaced trust in the man who saw the universe through a microscopic lens of _ kill or be killed _. 

“Aw Jeez, y-you’re really serious about it this time...” Morty pulled his yellow shirt over his head, “Do you really think we could get poisoned or something?” 

Rick didn’t immediately respond, and Morty stared for a few seconds too long at the bare, knobby spinal column of the older man, framed by a sharp belt and brown khakis. Rick caught Morty staring and rolled his eyes before pulling his sweater overhead as the teen hurriedly looked away in embarrassment. 

“Everything's poisonous on some level Morty. Over time we just develop resistance to our own toxins. The poison isn’t the issue. It’s the dosage.”

Rick pulled up his sleeve, laying his wrist against Morty’s forehead. “You’re not vomiting. That’s a good sign the suit did its job against radiation sickness, but nothing wrong with giving your immune system a little bit of aftercare. We just put our bodies through a radioactive zoo teeming with a triple threat of malevolent microorganisms—there’re millions of pathogens in that bio-hazardous dumping ground—some of em elder-Rick abominations. Most of ‘em’ll probably never even be classified.”

Rick added the rest of the materials, including the plastic tote onto the pile of materials before tossing a small black marble onto it. It instantly caught fire, disintegrating within seconds. 

“I do lab work for the Sanchez Citadel Government, and _ I _ didn’t even have the right BS clearance.” 

The scientist turned, leaving no trace, as he set their path back towards the nearest hyperloop station. 

“So just this once, if you feel a fever coming on—any kind of headache—or your body starts doing anything weird—more weird than normal—you gotta speak up about it, okay?”

Morty nervously swallowed, “Okay, Rick.”

***

The Rickport hyperloop station was only a few miles (not avoiding authorities) out from the forest, but by the time they had returned to civilization and Morty had climbed onto the familiar seats, and curled beneath the arm of his grandfather, he realized how exhausted he had become. He shifted away from a strange Rick in an oversized orange jacket and a trucker hat who was covered in filth, and further tucked himself into his grandfather’s torso. 

“Good Job today, Morty.” His voice reverberated against Morty’s skin with praise, and the teen pressed himself into the warm body beside him. Rick pulled his heavy lab coat from his body, and wrapped it around the teen before circling him with a protective arm, and pulling him closer into his chest.

His hand smoothed over the teen’s shoulder, and steadily shifted to a single thumb caressing distant circles of thought. Morty struggled to stay awake. It was so rare that he was given permission to be this close; able to listen to the man’s heart beating, but he was no match for the warmth of his grandfather's body and the gentle bob and sway of the hyperloop. He felt himself dozing off and jerked back to wakefulness. 

“Go ahead.” Rick’s arm tightened in a momentary squeeze of reassurance, as he gave Morty permission to sleep. “Grandpa’s got you.” 

He stirred back to consciousness with the feeling of being lifted and tossed against the older man’s chest in a reverse piggyback. The embarrassment lasted a split second, before Morty nuzzled back into the warm body, allowing himself to be carried back to their small apartment and tucked into bed. 

A pair of lips pressed against the hair on his forehead, bidding him goodnight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Check out the fic endnotes, and art over on the [ fic page. ](https://starry-citadel-au.neocities.org/metamorphosis.html)


	2. Senescence

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ** A/N: ** _Gimme dem Kudos for Scientist!Rick _—because this chapter took a lot of research and fact-checking. Special Shoutout to FiNR. Thank you so much for helping me with the lab stuff in this chapter.

A stark contrast to the overpopulated forest of the Shitadel they had returned from, the small odorless lab, like the silent and sterile atmosphere of a Morgue, felt vacuous. 

Rick, however, preferred it that way. Sealed away from everything, his high containment lab was the only place in the multiverse where he could allow himself to truly breathe, quarantined with his own dangerous thoughts and emotions in a space where he could safely investigate them. 

Operating the electric currents of the control panel, small lights adorning the lab equipment slowly blinked into existence; artificial stars as Rick threaded life through their structures. The fluctuating dials on his tanks, which normally hummed with activity, monitoring the day’s various tasks, had been shut down and left unattended so that the scientist could go out in the field with his grandson.

He weighed himself against the cold metal surface of his workbench and stared into the black floor at this feet. He sighed, releasing the tension in his body before pressing his fingers against his biological eye in a self-soothing gesture. Despite being exhausted from their short excursion in the field, the work of his daily Citadel charge remained. 

Rick donned a fresh lab coat: his Citadel work uniform which, in his unpopular opinion, went a little overboard with the whole _ mad scientist _ vibe it gave off. That whole phase with Abrodolf Linkler didn’t suddenly make them Dr. Frankenstein. They were probably closer to some Tim Curry, Frank N. Furter, rendition: stranded and unable to get home. 

He snapped the row of buttons along the line of his frame, fitting the collar snugly around his neck, before wrapping his body in the standard protection film like a cheap condom. He tightened the apron’s belt, sarcastically noting how far workplace safety regulations had come since the plumbus factories. 

Although Rick had a daily work quota to maintain on the Citadel (one he was planning to pull an all-nighter to achieve), he was unconcerned, confident that he’d be able to meet it in a few hours. Instead, he shifted his focus to the personal project at hand, strapping on a pair of lab goggles. Through the port in his ear, Rick plugged an additional small plasma screen into his cybernetic system, adjusting the small rectangular lens to align with his retina. 

A Lab Rick by Citadel assignment, Rick’s cybernetic eye came equipped with various telescopic and microscopic lenses. In the forest, he'd switched his eye to SEM mode, and it had been actively scanning, sampling and cataloging every organism the pair had come across. Thanks to his line of work, Rick had a fairly decent idea of what they’d encounter in the “Cordyceps Forest”—they hadn’t trespassed into it fully blind—but by the time Rick had had a sample size large enough to give him a substantial grasp on the level of unnatural degradation and mutations happening within the microorganisms, it had been too late to turn Morty around (at least, trusting that his grandson would make it back through the forest’s barrier alive without him). 

Running out of time, they’d had no choice but to keep moving forward. 

Rick reviewed the images in the silent confidence of his lab, hoping the calculated risk wasn’t going to cost them. He reached for his form of insurance, procuring a vial of gooey tissue from the field. The scientist had collected the mucousy samples of the semi-permeable membrane they’d passed through, with plans to reverse-engineer its genetic material. He’d be able to use the membrane’s own bio-blacklist as a template to produce a few natural killer cells, antigen binders and vaccines—in the event, he and Morty had stealthed back more than they’d bargained for. 

It was still too soon to detect any infection in their blood, but Rick was planning to use these first blood samples as a baseline and control—It had also been a while since he’d updated his and Morty’s microbiome database; a comprehensive serological profiling of the micro-organisms living within their bodies. 

If they had been contaminated by anything, it could be anywhere from hours to years before they began showing symptoms, and by the time they started showing on the latter end of that timeframe—if at all—it would already be too late. 

Rick wasn’t planning to wait around to find out. The Lab Rick wanted to know the second there was any aberrant behavior in either of their microbiomes. Understanding the biological arms race already underway, Rick was stockpiling an arsenal with the hope that he’d never have to use it.

Rick would have to process his own blood samples separately, using entirely different methods (radiation and Rick-standard blood-alcohol levels were kind of a bitch to deal with sometimes), so he began with Morty’s. 

Using a virus to do his dirty work for him, Rick injected a few genes into the cell's DNA to reprogram pluripotent cells. From there he purified the cell down to the stem and began the process of culturing the lab-to-table blood into clean, transfusion-ready bags. 

Not wanting to waste the remainder of the base sample, he pipetted the blood into a few spin tubes to separate out the plasma, running a CBC to accumulate more baseline information on Morty’s overall health. 

He tossed what was left onto some old-fashioned agar plates, doubting the teen had anything raging through his blood other than the hormonal onset of puberty. Instead, Rick wanted to introduce a few of the unclassified substances from the forest, observe the various reactions, and monitor any growth-dependent microbiology that resulted. 

Rick stared at the circular glass casing of his grandson’s seemingly harmless blood, thoughts racing, before frowning at the amount of work, and more so, the amount of_ care _he was putting into the extensive protocol measures—preparing for the full suite of potential infectious diseases. 

Maybe he was overcompensating for past failures. 

He set the blood aside and sat up straight in his stool, and popped a series of joints along his spinal column. Groaning alongside the sound, Rick felt the day's accumulated tension release.

It was easier to doubt oneself without his grandson present, and that was the reason _ why _ the scientist had decided to pull an all-nighter. He was internally working through a series of tests that could quantify some amount of certainty by morning.

So far, it was gearing up to be a long. fucking. night. He shifted his thoughts, reaching across his workbench to retrieve the day’s reward. 

The radioactive ore floated in the containment device, pulsing with a cautionary green glow. Rick drew his stool to the edge of his workspace, reaching into the glass cylinder with a pair of metal tongs and carefully removed the glowing metallic rock. 

He inserted it into Isotope Spectrometer, with cautious optimism. Thanks to their earlier field trip, Rick wouldn't have to try and synthesize bootleg portal fluid (introducing the most dangerous variables to the process). Long ago, he'd accepted the statistical probability of blowing himself up during routine lab work, but if he sent Morty through a portal that eviscerated him at a subatomic level he’d never forgive himself. 

Even with a lab full of equipment that the best money on the Citadel could buy, manufacturing portal fluid resulted in handling strange matter. Although Ricks had made the process safer post-atomic age, it would always be a risk, superimposed between life and death. 

Rick sighed, missing his portal gun which had a bit more fission than fusion capabilities, and if kept charged, in seconds was able to do the same amount of work without the same amount of dangerous by-product. 

His cybernetic system monitored the data in real-time, and Lab Ricks's eyes narrowed at the results and element analysis graphs that filtered onto the small plasma screen. A relieved grin spread across his face as the rest of the night suddenly grew a lot less life-threatening. 

He would have considered themselves lucky to have come across isotope 465, 235 or even 317, but they'd found the most stable. Isotope 322, and while it was only enough to open one gunless portal, it would be enough to send Morty home.

Over the years, the process had become second nature to Rick:

  1. _Sterilize the radioactive ore formation and move the element into a processor to be crushed. Leach in sulphuric acid and refine into a yellow cake concentration. _
  2. _Transfer into an enrichment chamber to convert into a gaseous form—compounding the potential radioactivity exponentially. _
  3. _Use the density—an approximation of gravity found within the core of a neutron star to trap the highly unstable subatomic particles; contain the ensuing fission until matter superimposes into the frictionless, liquid-like superfluid—somewhere between the three physical states. _

_ Strange matter could release enough energy to travel the sixth dimension. _

Pulse racing, Rick reveled at the physical impossibility of portal fluid, created by his own hands. 

Few highs could top this, but there was a reason isotope 322 and by extension, portal fluid, was a highly controlled substance (even on the Citadel). Through the glass window of the stainless steel chamber, Rick gazed into the intoxicating glow of unlimited potential, recalling with a wistful ache in his chest the first leap of faith through the swirling interdimensional vortex.

Reality itself moved beneath his fingertips; strange matter could fabricate and disassemble entire universes. 

No Rick. Not even himself should have access to this. 

Turning his back to the illustrious allure of an infinite doorway, Lab Rick stepped back from the reactor and went back to work. He’d need to let the substance cool and stabilize for a few days, after which, he’d use the Multiverse's potential to open an emergency exit for his grandson. 

He groaned, stretching his muscles overhead once more before mentally clocking into his Citadel shift. On Autopilot, he initiated the startup sequence for the ionic defibulizer, continuing to drink as he worked. He rotated the dial of the lab-sized pressure reactor to 11, pushing the equipment to double its output of megaseed cytoplasm. On this setting, he’d be able to reach his daily production quota before the shift’s end. 

Outside the Citadel, the cytoplasm was traditionally synthesized with isotope 322, but the controlled substance was virtually inaccessible, leaving Ricks to treat themselves with lesser elements like uranium, radium, and plutonium, which inevitably made them occasionally sick—The Citadel Morning News had a field day breaking that story to their citizens. 

Ricks like himself (with cellular powered matrices and radioactive blood) needed to ingest a periodic biological solution of megaseed cytoplasm, otherwise, the alpha decay in their matrices would permeate their cell walls and make them violently ill (again, radiation-poisoning and alcoholism were a bitch to live with sometimes). 

His eyes drifted to what remained of the refined, enriched isotope 322 powder, sitting within arm’s reach. He hadn’t used all of the concentration to create the portal fluid, but there wasn’t enough for a second portal. Rick tapped his fingers on his workbench in silent deliberation of his obvious next move. It had been ages since he’d synthesized and ingested _ real _megaseed cytoplasm.

In the forest, moving through the undilated movement of time, Rick remembered what it felt like to be alive, and hours later, his body still hummed in exhilaration, stirring to life some primordial biological sense that he’d long forgotten. He closed his eyes still riding the physical and mental ecstasy it had brought him. The forest was a watered-down version of what _ true _megaseed cytoplasm was capable of—what isotope 322 was capable of. 

Reminiscent, Rick’s eyes traveled the depths of an endless sky—reliving worlds beyond the frame of his laboratory window. A weighted sigh escaped the scientist’s lungs; filled with unspoken emotion he would never have expressed in front of the teen. 

They hadn’t found enough of the rare isotope for two. 

Rick had already resigned himself to the reality that he wasn’t going to be able to follow Morty back home.

A small consolation, Rick dissolved the concentrated isotope powder and megaseed cytoplasm into his flask, resting the metallic corner to the surface of his vortexer until a slightly luminescent shade of absinthe pulsed with a radioactive hue against the container’s mouth. 

Beyond the safety of his lab, the curved shape of the Citadel’s glass dome glinted against the momentary green skyline.

The Citadel was an endpoint in life, using Rick’s own aging bodies to imprison them within the glorified home and hospice. Reduced to a microcosm: institutionalized to a reality that began and ended at the rotating glass barrier of what Rick could only think of as some fucked up social experiment, or a voluntary quarantine. Each Rick was a walking destroyer of worlds. Their biological clocks, minutes to midnight, counted down the inevitable breakdown of their atomic bodies. 

In essence, Ricks were here waiting to die. 

His crusty organic eye squinted out across the sterilized skyline, briefly contemplating the stars he’d never again travel to. He swirled the last bit of contents in his flask before draining it—he really should have treated himself to something nicer than a screwdriver, but after pulling an all-nighter, he’d grown too exhausted to care (and with vodka, he never had to worry about the bloat).

He _ still _had work to do. 

He sank into the remainder of his routine lab work, continuing to drink as the hours of his triple shift blurred into a disorienting reality of steady production.

A few hours later, his cybernetic system pinged him with a notification, and the lab worker returned to the membrane sample, already downloading the analysis results. A list of various reports filtered onto Rick’s screen. He opened a few, reading over the added information: new diagrams illustrating molecular and protein structures. Some of the samples had been matched with files from the Citadel Disease Control database and were now classified with names and additional information. 

Rick acknowledged some of the higher-level threats with a low trailing whistle, thankful it was only flu season on the Citadel and that mosquitoes naturally avoided his radioactive blood. The secondary list was mutated derivatives of the first, and the final files remained cataloged but unclassified. It was by far the longest of the three lists, and it was that knowledge which left a sudden sinking feeling in Rick’s gut. 

“...The universe is vague and full of ambiguity, Morty.” 

Rick spoke aloud to his absent grandson, toggling the datasheet to skim Morty’s updated microbiome data. In addition to the mandatory vaccinations Morty had received on his first day, there were a few new resistances he’d naturally acquired since moving to the Citadel. Overall, nothing abnormal or out of place on the viromal list of everyday pathogens. His blood looked good, with average variables across the board. 

Rick’s eyes moved onto Morty’s genome, reading over the list of congenital infections with an unnamed emotion accumulating in his chest. In the sterile silence, it lingered in his thoughts like a living disease, and grinding his teeth in resentment, Rick leered at the name of the first xeno-viral pathogen he’d characterized a phenotypic profile for and classified in his work. 

_ Unitas Essendi _

Named after Unity, who’d infected him with his first space transmitted disease. 

It was a sudden unpleasant reminder that he was _ literally _ toxic and Unity was _ literally _a parasite; their relationship started with a half-life—doomed to fail before it had even begun. It was ultimately the radiation coursing through Rick’s veins and its ability to permanently damage genetic material that prevented Rick’s eternal union with the alien lifeform. 

Instead, his close encounter of auto-erotic assimilation was what ultimately led the scientist to focus his passions on astrobiochemistry. Rick scoffed into the empty space of his lab, refusing to give any of his exes credit for helping to shape the person he now was.

Morty, however, was a different story. 

Beth had attachment issues, but it had never crossed Rick’s self-loathing mind to see it as anything more than a mix of an abandonment complex, the fetishization of the extraordinary, and his own shitty parenting skills. 

When her son was born, and Rick made first contact, however, the scientist had been overwhelmed with a cocktail of bonding chemicals. Closely following the euphoric high, Rick had developed an irrational attachment that could have easily been mistaken for cosmic apotheosis; some sort of paternalistic paradigmatic shift in his biochemistry. 

Immediately suspicious, he had mapped out the newborn’s genes, suspecting a link to the Galactic Federation hidden within the fresh bundle of cells. Rick hadn’t expected to trace the results back to himself (though in hindsight, he wasn't all that surprised at what he’d found). 

His grandson had inherited somewhere around 18-32% of his genetic material, including _ Unitas Essendi. _After Rick had built a natural immunity to the STD, the virus had integrated into Rick’s X chromosome as a recessive mutation, and later, had been inherited by his offspring through germline transmission. 

Beth was a guaranteed silent carrier who’d inherited Rick’s recessive gene. Summer had been a coin toss, but her younger brother and Beth’s firstborn son—by virtue of his male sex—was guaranteed to be an active carrier of the mutation. Nature really fucked the draw with him. 

Rick had always felt responsible for Morty, but it wasn’t until he’d helplessly watched the virulent replication happening within Morty’s cells—activated and uncontrollably mutating from the radioactive catalyst emanating from Rick Sanchez’s own body—that he realized, he _ had _been. 

Rick was dealing with an entirely new species:_ Unitas Essendi _ had mutated away from Unity’s hive-mind influence, but after nearly half a century, the now independently evolved virus was still biologically programmed to assimilate with Rick Sanchez’s organic matter, unafraid of its radioactive nature. 

It was still waiting to complete its life cycle. 

Rick named it Mortimer.

Another unintended consequence of Rick Sanchez. 

Morty was a constant subject of study in the scientist's lab. From the clinical distance of his laboratory, Rick observed Mortimer with the guiding principle of non-interference as the boy grew. The parasite was likely the reason Morty was categorized as_ learning disabled _ by both his parents _ and _the school system. He was clumsy, with poor motor skills and coordination, but while his mental thought processes ran slower than most of his peers, his empathy and emotional intelligence were highly perceptive. 

Rick speculated it was the result of the mutated gene prioritizing a developmental skill-set focused entirely on connection with other organisms—some sort of faux assimilation. After all, the original biological contagion was produced naturally by Unity as a means to mutate and replicate the host’s DNA with the endgame of being able to more effectively exploit and assimilate said organism. Prioritizing empathy along with social skills was an advantageous soft skill-set to supplement his grandson’s biological programming.

A normal life wasn’t something that Morty would ever be able to have, because of Rick. 

Aside from the developmental birth defects and the awkward sexual attraction developing towards his grandfather alongside puberty, Morty was asymptomatic. Rick had already built an immunity to the UE virus somewhere in his late 30’s, ultimately concluding that he didn’t have much to worry about: _ Don’t think about it. _

As Morty developed into puberty, however, the shift in his biochemistry was sudden and overwhelming. Running out of questionable-but-still-ethical options, Rick had taken a Citadel assignment doing lab work, hoping to collaborate with a few other versions of himself who were researching the same multiversal phenomena. 

The disappointing result was discovering that while many Ricks and Mortys carried the original UE virus and its mutated derivative, the infinite variables of two mutations occurring within the genetic material of three different carriers, essentially bio-encrypted each virus within its own dimensional context. 

The result, occasionally witnessed on the Citadel, was an unsettling phenomenon where a Morty could recognize their dimensional Rick on a subatomic level. 

After a lifetime of existing within the confines of his own carefully constructed mental and emotional barriers, Morty would gaze into him—unmoving and expressionless—with that creepy-as-fuck level of recognition. Rick had never felt more uncomfortably exposed.

When Morty wasn't being a little creep, the wide-eyed teen naturally elevated Rick’s levels of dopamine, cortisol, and serotonin whenever they were in arms reach, and although Rick understood the effect of being near Morty as fundamentally biological in nature, it had become increasingly difficult to compartmentalize. 

It was convenient that Morty’s cells had a built-in resistance to Rick’s radioactive body. It was a great excuse to keep his grandson around, whether the dumb shit was assisting him with routine lab work, or jumping through portals with him. He’d never regretted taking Morty on adventures, even when doing so often resulted in the older man risking his own life to save his grandson’s. 

Morty had been the first negative consequence in Rick’s life that he had made a genuine effort to take ownership of (even if his sudden change of heart was entirely motivated by his own continued survival). 

On adventures—outside the emotional safety of his quarantined lab—Rick was unable to analyze the objective, measurable truth: the onset of Mortimer developing into sexual maturity had transfigured the scientist’s already irrational attachment into toxic levels of codependency and obsession. 

It was easy to forget, but in the vacuous silence of his lab, Rick shuddered in sudden visceral fear, acknowledging the cold unfeeling data as it encroached the lens of his subjectivity. 

He wasn't sure what terrified him more: that the virus was fully exploiting Morty's natural human development to fulfill its singular purpose, or that somewhere in the fourteen years that Rick had studied Morty’s development, he’d decided to no longer account for the most important variable. 

Rick could have easily destroyed Morty. 

Instead, the scientist had raised him. Groomed him. Protected him. 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


He needed space. A lot of it. 

He needed to deny his biological programming and send Morty home. 

***

With a stretch, Morty roused himself, wetting his dry mouth as he shifted into the half-waking memory of being cradled in Rick’s arms. The teen had fallen asleep to the sound of the man's beating heart, and its effervescent rhythm had pulsed through his dreams. 

He woke, aching to return to it. 

With a mixture of embarrassment and guilt, Morty slipped his hand over the swollen bulge of his underwear. Sometime last night, Rick had stripped the teen of his clothing while tucking him into bed. Closing his eyes, Morty allowed his head to fall back onto the pillow, and with a gasp, increased the pressure and friction over his clothed erection. The cooling sensation of his sweat brushed against his feverish imagination, and Morty lifted his hips into the shape of his open palm, reaching. 

With a groan, he chewed his lip in sexual frustration. He knew it was probably a little weird, but in the safety of his morning thoughts, Morty let himself to relive each moment of the lingering memory.

Rick shifted their combined weight as he lowered their bodies onto the mattress. He hugged the boy’s torso toward him as rough hands dragged across the youth’s back, slipping beneath his yellow shirt. Unhesitating, he carefully removed Morty’s yellow shirt, before guiding the teen to his side on the surface of the warm bedding. Rick’s hands traced the outline of Morty’s frame— lingering on the denim over his thigh—before wrapping a hand around the teen’s hip. He gently encouraged Morty onto his back, reaching to unfasten the clasp of his grandson’s jeans. The sound of a zipper releasing itself stirred Morty to a sudden awareness. His head shifted around him, searching, as his body tried to wake up. 

_ “G-grandpa Rick?” _

_ “Grandpas’ got you.” _

Morty called out his grandfather’s name, heart racing, and the gravelly sound of the scientist’s voice responded, speaking to the teen in reassurance. Rick’s breath fell heavy and acrid against his skin, and Morty relaxed into the sound of his grandfather’s voice. 

Offering exhausted assistance, the abrasive sound instructed the teen to _ go back to sleep._ Morty nodded and groggily lifted his hips, helping to push the denim of his pants past his bony pelvis. His grandfather gently tugged each pant leg away from his body. 

Left in only his underwear and socks, Morty returned to his side, drifting back into the warm embrace of well-earned sleep. With the encouragement to rest well, Rick’s soft laughter fell into the otherwise quiet room as he offered a few paternalistic pats on Morty’s butt. 

The heavy dip of bedding released as Rick’s weighted knee withdrew its presence, leaving the teen to the fantastical figments of his slumber. 

Morty panted into his wakefulness. His body hummed with the vibrancy of conscious thought; electric currents surged across the salt and sweat of his skin and with a dizzying gasp of ecstasy, he dreamed of his own thighs, clenching and shuddering around the older man’s equally sweat-strewn frame. He dreamed of Rick’s bony fingers, sharply and meticulously examining the teen’s body with eyes illuminated by an eviscerating lucidity. 

Morty imagined each slow methodical thrust of the older man’s hips, further opening him in an act of vivisection. He wanted his body to take in the trailing spit of Rick’s sloppy drunk lips as the older man, in a savage exchange of tongue and teeth, fervidly fucked the teen’s mouth open to sate their shared instinctual carnal desire. Morty wanted all of him, and the teen’s mouth fell open in violent ecstasy as he fantasized the final sensation of Rick’s essence— blooming, in hot pulsing beats from his grandfather’s aging body: saturating the inner walls of his intestines as he wholly offered himself to Morty. 

“_ Aw Jeez—Aw fuck,_ Gran-Grandpa Rick.” 

Morty gaped in awe, eventually opening his eyes to the sticky mess of body fluid he’d created. Surrounded by the lingering remnants, Morty relaxed his hand over the twitching, deflating erection, and allowed himself to catch his breath. 

“Aw Jeez,” he repeated with a deepening blush as his senses returned to him. Physically sated, for the time being, he rose and cleaned from his body the evidence of his honest emotions. 

His sexual attraction was growing more obvious by the day, and Morty didn’t know how much longer he’d be able to hide it from his grandfather (assuming he didn’t already know). Morty didn’t know which scenario was worse: that Rick _ had _ known, and had willfully ignored it, or that he noticed the teen so little that he actually _ was _ oblivious to it. 

Rick had grown more distant since they'd arrived at the Citadel. For a while, he had noncommittally promised they'd go out for Ice Cream. Morty never doubted the scientist had _ intended _ to keep his promise, but Rick never really got around to it. 

Ironically, on the Citadel, he was never able to make the time. 

But maybe today. 

With a sigh, Morty dressed and wandered through the path of his daily routine. Although half the space of their high-rise condo was dedicated entirely to Rick's laboratory, their unit in Starline Apartments was far too large for two: Ricks, Mortys or some combination of. 

When they’d first arrived, his grandfather didn't seem to care about any room that wasn't his lab—which, since the scientist had stored a permanent military-style sleeping cot inside the research workshop, it had doubled as Rick’s bedroom.

Morty switched on the radio to fill the heavy silence, walking his breakfast to the balcony of their high-rise. With a newfound sense of wonderment, he leaned over the glass railing and examined the small universe he inhabited on the Citadel. Artificial sunlight gilded the tallest of the golden skyscrapers, while smaller buildings rose around their base. The distinct clustering shapes and characteristics of the city reflected the maps of constellations in the sky. 

> _“It's the top of the hour on another beautiful, starry morning on the Citadel, and you're listening to the voice of Radio Rick, speaking to you from Sanchez Citadel Radio as we continue to turn up the heat with Summer Sizzle. We’ve got some more music coming your way to break up the congested morning traffic, but first, a few words from our local businesses that keep us on air: Big Rico’s Pizzeria...”_

Below his vantage point of the balcony, Ricks and Mortys lived and moved within their established pathways. Morty observed the microorganisms moving together through the world in synchronized rhythm—reminiscent of the same patterns of life he had discovered in the forest. 

The teen glanced over his shoulder, allowing his eyes to settle over the glass entrance to Rick’s Lab. The entire wall was made of glass, and from the balcony, Morty could see nearly the entire lab. He used to watch his Rick work, until the day his grandfather had glanced up from his workstation to discover Morty, silently standing on the other side of the glass, watching him. Rick called him a _creeping-tom,_ and since that day, Rick had changed the lab settings, frosting the layers of the glass wall to give himself some privacy (as if their living space wasn't private enough)

In contrast to the forest, the high-rise apartment gave Morty the impression of being isolated. Like the sparsely populated furniture, Morty had furnished Rick’s life with an unassuming presence. He spent most of his time in their high-rise, content to entertain himself or on rare occasions offer lab assistance to the scientist. Rick only occasionally had guests over, when it was work, or employees-with-benefits related. 

When Rick wasn't working in the lab, he was usually exhausted and grouchy, and rarely wanted to go out. He'd given Morty an allowance to spend, encouraging the teen to get out of the high rise on his own and make some friends other than_ this version of his grandfather._

Morty had always been given the freedom to spend his life and his time on the Citadel however he wanted, and for the first few weeks, he _ had _ explored the Citadel. However, without having his grandfather there to enjoy it with him, he’d quickly lost interest. 

Their individual sense of personal space had been gradually dissolved over the years. Sometimes, when Rick was really drunk, he called it_ co-dependent._

As long as Morty could remember, he'd always felt a natural familial closeness with his grandfather, but recently, Morty's sudden sexual attraction toward him had shifted the meaning of their everyday interactions into something more confusing. Something harder to navigate. 

Although Rick had probably been thought of as a number of things on Earth, Morty didn't really want his family’s final remembrance of Rick Sanchez to be some kind of sexual predator. _ Morty _was the creep—developing perverse thoughts and feelings that he should've never had toward the older man. 

Rick had given him a choice, and ultimately motivated to protect his family from the distorted discomfort of Morty’s cosmic perspective, he had decided to follow his grandfather to the Citadel. 

He'd seen more than a few Rick and Morty couples on the Citadel of Ricks. _His _grandfather, however, was so completely different from the Ricks openly demonstrating romantic love and affection toward their grandsons. 

It was an unexpected discovery, but after watching their public displays of affection, Morty had realized he felt nothing in response; no envy, or fear; no desire to be in their place. He’d just wanted to go back home. He wanted to be near his Rick, fully satisfied with whatever capacity the scientist would allow their relationship to have.

Occasionally Rick made an effort to order takeout, and share a meal with Morty, or offered to _ Sanchez and Chill,_ —watching Ball Fondlers until both fell asleep on the couch. The last time, however, Morty woke to find himself dry-humping Rick's thigh and instead of being justly shocked and appalled, Rick simply studied Morty in hard silence with a cold, clinical gaze, before promptly returning his attention back to the TV. 

Morty pretended to ignore the outline of his grandfather's erection —hard and warm against the teen's thigh. He tried to go back to sleep.

Rick pretended that it never happened. 

They hadn't spoken of it (or Sanchez & chilled) since. 

Rick had never expressed outright disgust toward the teen. His non-verbal actions, however, communicated the emotions far louder than the scientist’s non-stop stream of words. 

Over the past few months, their natural closeness had been intentionally disturbed. Morty had felt the subtle shifts of changing rhythms between them. The sickly sweet smell of fermentation that followed Rick's body and his alcohol sweats, had died down as the older man attempted to cut back. Their daily interactions had fallen out of sync. They no longer randomly encountered each other in the commons spaces. When they spoke to each other, the subtle vocal tones vibrating within everyday words and phrases had changed pitch, and conversations no longer lingered on the unimportant. 

Morty was certain: if he were honest, about the true nature of his emotions— how deep they ran for the scientist. Rick would reject Morty entirely. 

Continuing to hide them, however, felt like a betrayal of whatever relationship they _ did _have—romantic or not. 

Sometimes, Rick let his grandson help out in the lab, but other times, Morty felt like the scientist shut himself away in the workroom _ just _ to get away from the teen. Those hours Rick spent at work were long and lonely. Yesterday's adventure had reminded Morty just how much he had missed spending time with his grandfather. 

The clock over the doorway to the HCL entrance read fifteen minutes to midnight. A stark bold line pointed non-threateningly over the first of four large dots. 

Morty had permission to enter the lab today. 

He searched for signs of life in the near-lifeless space, pulling the vacuum-sealed latch to release the door. With a distinct hiss, the airlock decompressed, as the glass panel glided to the side. As unobtrusively as possible, Morty poked his head through the seal. 

***

Rick was in his Citadel work uniform, hunched over his desk, staring at a large holographic screen. Morty located him in the computer and paperwork section of the bioscience lab (the part of the lab that was okay for Morty's _ contaminated little un-gloved fingers _ to touch). 

Seeing his grandfather already hard at work by the time Morty woke up wasn’t uncommon by this time of day: the concept of a work-life balance was nonexistent to his Rick, _ every experiment was different. _ It was rare for the scientist to leave the high-level demanding work in his lab. 

Morty once loved exploring the shelves filled with all sizes and shapes of glass beakers. The various pieces of glass sharply refracting the harsh multi-colored fluorescent lights. He exhilarated alongside the machines; they chirped and churned, belching thick columns of steam into the overhead vents. 

The lab represented all the things that Rick loved. The space was a physical, external manifestation of the passions which had transformed his grandfather into the scientist he currently was. 

“Morning,” Morty greeted before frowning, noticing the flask in his grandfather’s hand. “Aw Jeez, you’re drinking already?” 

“Never stopped,” Rick matter-of-fact replied as he waved his grandson further into the workspace; his gesture silently and impatiently told Morty to _ hurry up so the door could close behind him._

Morty listened to the non-verbal que, and his eyes skimmed the mess of materials scattered about the various workstations as he passed by. He'd been a lab assistant for his grandfather long enough to suspect that Rick had been working for a while, if not the entire night. 

“Grandpa Rick, did you uh, sleep at all after…” Morty trailed, slipping into a silent blush remembering how his grandfather had left him. 

Rick turned to face Morty. The older man looked extremely tired, but he rolled his eyes at the teen’s question, feigning offense at it. He turned back to his workstation. 

“Morty. Sleeping time is like, half of all time—I-I’ll catch up on sleep when I blackout or die.” 

Rick impatiently folded his arms, granting his attention to his grandson, instead of his work. “Wh-what do you want?”

Morty had loved the lab. Until he’d realized the laboratory of the scientist's dreams held no place for Morty: He wasn't essential to Rick's life. 

"I uh, I just…" 

Morty trailed, averting his gaze. From his peripherals, the teen's eyes caught the eerie green glow emanating from a large metal chamber, and his jaw tightened. Rick must have already made portal fluid. 

Rick caught Morty staring, and commented on the expression magnified by emotion on his face. 

"It should stabilize over the next few days. I-It’s taking longer than we wanted, but without a portal gun, homebrew is the best I can do."

Rick couldn’t wait to send Morty back to Earth. 

Morty’s frown deepened, and with a distant gaze, he denied the swirling green vortex of a reality he would eventually have to face. 

“It made enough portal fluid?” He questioned, looking for last-ditch excuses.

“Well, technically, it’s enough to make a fluid portal—Y’know, power the quantum construction of an inter-dimensional tunnel.” Rick glanced with warm adoration to the chamber, and a rare smile tugged the corners of his mouth. “It’s the most important thing to a Rick, Morty. If I didn’t fuck up the math, I'm certain it'll get you home.” 

Rick’s triumphant declaration blared into Morty’s senses, confirming his earlier suspicions. His pulse raced, and he forced himself to breathe, the sound of his own voice climbing into an anxious bargaining panic. “Aw, Jeez. Sh-should we go back to look for more—” 

“—Morty, that's such a poor use of my time, it's beneath me.” Rick removed his gloves and goggles, tossing them onto the table, before unplugging his work lens and shucking himself from his plastic apron. He rose from his stool, quickly changing the subject. 

“I have a better idea." He tossed the apron over his workstations chair before cracking his back and knuckles. "Let's finally go out and get some ice cream."

Rick didn't want Morty to think about it.

Like the promise of ice cream, Rick’s intentions would be well placed. Rick would reassure Morty that he wasn’t far behind, and would see him back on Earth in a couple of days. Morty knew. Before the words were even uttered from the scientist’s well-intentioned lips, Morty knew that Rick would be lying. 

“Okay, Rick." Morty smiled into his sense of powerlessness, eager to spend just a little more time with his grandfather. Before it was time to say goodbye. 

"Ice cream sounds nice.”

***

  


The Morty-Hop had decent _ AwJeez _ reviews, and within walking distance from their high rise, the small jukebox diner was fast and convenient: the obvious choice for taking his grandson out for ice cream.

“Hey, Morty-Q, why don’t you take this Earth model out for a test drive, and see what’s under the hood?” A few booths down, a Morty with rolled-up sleeves, greased-back hair, and dog tags pointedly flashed his unlit cigarette in an attempt to impress the carhop server he was flirting with. Rick passively wondered if _ this _was what his grandkids got up to these days. Maybe it was a good thing his grandson stayed home all the time.

The bright colors and plated pieces of chrome were like a strange Lynchian Lovecraft-child: a playful pastiche of_ Pulp Fiction,_ crashing into an homage of _ American Graffiti,_ all held together with a little bit of _Grease._

It _ almost _made Rick feel like he’d traveled back in time, but ultimately, the scientist felt more like he’d stepped into another dimension (maybe one far, far away). 

The uncanny valley of nostalgia was overwhelmingly familiar, but the more out-of-place details Rick noticed, the more he was pulled from his moment of sensory escapism and into the _ Twilight Zone _ that was just another day on the Citadel. 

Fuck, he missed travel by portal. Rick had forgotten how convenient portal technology had made his life. But now that he was once again riding the high of having access to it, he constantly craved the idea of using portal fluid. His finger’s anxiously tapped on the Formica table’s glossy surface, searching for a fix. His just wasn't found in the past.

Everyrick had a gimmick. 

“Cherry berries! I can’t keep track of yer’ candy-asses rollin’ 'round the clock like this!”

Rick snorted at the caricature of himself: posing cooly against the front counter, angling his shoulders to flash the look of his clean and polished leather jacket. He ran a pommed-up comb through the erect threads of his best Elvis Presley impression. 

Waggling his unibrow to the reflection in his flask, the Greaser Rick shot himself a finger gun gesture, clicking his tongue in admiration and pride. The presentation was so Rick-diculously over the top, that the scientist passively wondered if his dimensional counterpart was from some kind of 50’s AU, or if the act was just some kind of Ricksona. 

Then again,_ he _wore a lab coat outside of his lab as a form of casual wear: to each his own.

It wasn’t the worst look he’d seen for himself. In fact, the tight denim jeans hugging Greaser Rick’s ass and thighs as the reflection of his own (physically fit, muscular) body leaned over the counter... Now, _ those _were drawing the right kind of attention. 

Seemingly reading Rick’s thoughts, a Morty carhop whistled at their _ Daddy-O _ as they skated by. 

Regarding his infinite grandchildren, Rick hadn’t fully figured out what the _ wholesome establishment _ referred to as "Shortys": a series of Morty carhops in cutoff shorts and crop-tops, or waitress dresses. All on roller skates _ wholesomely _free-wheeling around the diner while domestically balancing trays of burgers, fries, and milkshakes. 

He smiled in self-amusement. For all he knew, vanilla _ was _the whole kink, and he was wholesomely unaware of it. 

[ The jukebox’s music ](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3Fj8T2uYRPGx3KdL0YHOvd?si=2YnNrL4bTBK1C0cN5No6Jw) danced around them as the Morty carhop skated over to their booth. He smiled wide in anticipation, spinning in a tight circle before placing a large milkshake between the pair. 

“Hoo wee!” the carhop winked toward Morty, “Whatta way to pop the clutch!” 

Rick immediately frowned as his gaze moved to assess the details of the seemingly innocent frozen treat—caring for the first time that afternoon, what his grandson had _ actually _just ordered for them to share. 

“Wh-what is this?” Rick turned his attention to the Mortyhop who played annoyingly coy with a barely concealed grin. The tall speckled vanilla bean dessert filled an old-fashioned soda-lime glass: the petaled rim presentation was decorated with wafers and topped with a generous amount of whipped cream, chocolate/caramel drizzle, and the obligatory cherry-on-top. 

The bright red of the maraschino popped from the display in a cautionary burst of color. Rick suspiciously shifted his gaze to Morty. 

“Thought you were getting some ice cream.” 

“It’s a Rick Potion No.9!” The Shorty explained with a nervous laugh, hugging the tray over his chest, "Y'know, cause _[ Love is Strange](https://open.spotify.com/track/7MVrcX2RcCU6qypBtNJQiO?si=9sn1clWhQAelCCrZuPebPw)." _He pointedly spoke aloud, and the digital jukebox processed the song request with a responsive chime. Despite the cutting-edge Citadel technology, the vintage rhythmic sounds of rock ‘n’ roll, spilled from the classic jukebox.

  


Strange in a _ John Waters _ kind of way. Rick’s unimpressed expression to yet another pop-culture reference remained unchanged. 

Citadel tech had made him paranoid, but in all honesty, he'd been paranoid since Namn. The years had turned him into a crotchety old dick, and whatever voice recognition technology the diner implemented as part of their sound system, Rick _ hoped _ the old-fashioned atmosphere hadn’t also come equipped with big brother surveillance.

“No, I mean. What’s—what the fuck’s in it?” Rick’s eyes narrowed, and accusingly flicked between the split variations of his grandson: His Morty, whose immediately guilty expression admitted some level of conspiracy as he nervously shifted in his seat, and the Shorty beside him, defiant, who slapped one hand on the table. He anchored the other hand on his hip—intending to intervene with the older man’s abrasive attitude. 

“Jeeeezer, old geezer! Stop burning so much rubber! Y’know, Rick’s who’re bad news like that? They’re cruisin' for a bruisin—go-goin’ nowhere fast!”

He’d be impressed with the fifties vernacular if he wasn’t already annoyed by it. Rick resisted the urge to send the Morty rolling across the checker-board laminate tile. 

If any of the Mortys fell on their ass (actually, it was really a question of when), they’d be entirely unprotected from the fall—blissfully unaware of the microscopic lifeforms passing through the petri dish of their public space. 

Curious to serve his own sense of satisfaction, Rick momentarily switched his cybernetic eye to an ultraviolet lens, giving the place a quick scan. There was an unsurprising amount of body fluid stains on the booths and counters, but overall the place was clean enough to be considered _ up to code._

Across the table,_ His grandson _ began to apologize, but the Shorty interrupted. Holding the older man's gaze, the carhop threateningly leered while sliding the milkshake in front of the customer who'd ordered it. 

“What kind of _ Rickstablishment _do you think this is?” 

_ His _ Morty pulled the milkshake closer to him, intending to consume the entire thing himself (well, at least the gesture confirmed Rick hadn’t been _ slipped a Morty _). Morty half-heartedly picked at the cherry topping and defeatedly sighed while the Shorty took offense on his counterpart's behalf.

“This is a dairy bar! Not some kind of passion pit!” The Shorty offered a sympathetic look toward his interdimensional counterpart, then glared to Rick once more. He shifted his weight and rolled away from the table. 

“We don't have round heels, y’know?” He glanced over his shoulder as he skated away, “We’re all just here lookin’ to have a good time! So cut the gas, gramps! Or your berries are never gonna get razzed!” 

Ricks's eyes narrowed at the thematic word salad, confused by the overall tone; whether or not there was some thinly veiled sexual subtext, _ wholesomely masquerading _ in that seemingly innocent statement. The music slowed to an _ Unchained Melody _ and Morty avoided Rick’s gaze, still trying to explain himself. 

“Aw Jeez Grandpa Rick, I’m sorry. I-It was just a joke. Get it! Hah. Hah Hah...” Morty filled the awkward silence with his forced, nervous laughter—convincing no one. “Cause that would… It would never be us, y’know. N-not in a hundred years!” 

Two straws innocently decorated the melting milkshake between them, and alongside the rising temperature of Morty’s blush, Rick practically saw the abandoned wet dream draining from the kid’s face. 

"Yeah, sorry Morty." Rick forced a single laugh alongside the teen, before plucking his straw from the glass with a half-assed explanation, "Cooties."

Morty had stopped laughing. His voice was quiet as he reluctantly took a sip of the milkshake, still trying to have a good time despite being familyzoned. 

“...Not even in an eternity,” he lamented to the wishful cherry-on-top.

  


Rick’s expression softened, and his lips pulled into a tight line, momentarily torn. Rick's own experiences with parasites promised that the _ awareness _ of being selected to act as a host didn’t really _ solve _ anything. In fact, the only thing it usually resulted in was making things existentially worse.

Even before the teenage-rager currently overpowering Morty’s pubescent body, Rick had decided the most merciful thing for his grandson was his own inability to comprehend the true essence of his existence.

Morty was contaminated with a parasite he couldn't even imagine enough to fear.

Rick settled for his out-of-this-world grandparenting skills and changed the subject, shifting awkwardly in the booth’s leather seat. 

"Y-know, this place. It really takes me back. Did I ever have you watch that old-timer movie? _ Invasion of The Body Snatchers?" _ Rick lifted an eyebrow to his grandson. 

"Uh, I don't think so, Grandpa Rick." 

"These aliens. Th-they take over Earth-people. They look like your friends—your family—but they're not… themselves anymore. They've become a part of _it." _

"Aw jeez Rick, that's pretty scary, y’know?" Morty gave his best effort to the small conversation while mindlessly poking his straw through the frozen cream. "I-I mean. If you can't trust the people closest to you, then who _ can _ you trust?"

"Exactly," Rick agreed, grateful for Morty's ignorant reinforcement of his own shitty actions, "But it's a recipe for McCarthyism—Creating _ Monsters on Maple Street."_

Distracted, the teen continued to stir his thoughts into the dreamy cream of their unshared future as it continued to melt. His eyes were way too big for his stomach. There was no way, Morty would finish it fast enough. 

“Hey, Grandpa Rick?” Morty looked up in a sudden change of thoughts, biting his lip, “Do you think Ricks could uh, could they really make some sort of witch doctor thing happen—inside of someone’s mind? Like uh... are love potions? Are they a real thing?” 

Rick sighed, tapping his fingers on the table in thought._ How appropriately thematic_. 

“Morty,” Rick began, contemplating his answer to the seemingly innocent question, “Love _ is S_trange. A strange science. What you call love, it’s just a form of chemistry. Independent agents that are completely and irrevocably altered through some sort of catalyzing agent. Yeah, sure, the process is naturally occurring. It could easily be manufactured in a lab, it's nothing more than cause and effect. Just another biological process.” 

Unable to help himself, his grandson let out a dreamy romantic sigh, and Rick disapprovingly frowned at the lovesick teen’s selective hearing. He interrupted with a scoff.

“—Yeah, don’t break your arm jerking yourself off to the idea.” He folded his own arms over his chest, sinking into the booth. There wasn't much room to sink into with his knees already jutting against the underside of the table. “It’s not nearly as romantic as you think.”

The pair settled into another awkward silence, and Rick made another attempt at relaxing and enjoying the cheap superficial slice of Americana, which had cherry-picked the best of a bad decade. 

He remembered the reality (at least, his dimensional reality): the Great Depression; a couple of red scares; the ugly fight for civil rights; the Korean war; the arms race; the classic fear of the other (in the form of foreign invaders); and the hallmark slow-burning decay of the nuclear family. 

_ Things were different back then, _ but on the Citadel—sitting in the romanticized 50’s era diner—all things considered, between the age difference and the daddy-o kinks, Rick felt like he hadn’t missed a beat. 

Somehow, after nearly half a century, the superficial atmosphere they had stepped into still felt optimistic about a future yet-to-come: before the world, blissfully unaware, sailed full force into the failed promise of the atomic age. 

He pursed his lips, annoyed at the indeterminacy of their existence. Maybe Greaser Rick’s timeline had been different, and Rick was projecting his own lived experiences into a different universe. 

But Earth had usually been a simpler period in their collective timelines. Maybe the simple pleasures of life—before it went to shit—maybe _ that _was what the wholesome kink was all about. 

He _remembered_ Dairy Bars. He was Morty's age, dreaming of stupid shit like sharing milkshakes too.

Through the window beside them, an intergenerational couple walked by holding hands. Rick and Morty had often seen couples of themselves on the Citadel, and from the first encounter, Rick had actively worked to discourage Morty from believing that such a phenomena would ever be possible for them—the last thing the little parasite needed was an opportunity. 

Lost in his thoughts, Rick’s gaze returned to his grandson. Morty was where Rick had left him; staring at his milkshake as if it had just spilled onto the checkerboard laminate. Rick wasn’t sure if he’d seen anything sadder in his seventy years. He frowned, distrustful of the sudden, burning sensation of guilt in his chest, but eventually acquiesced to it. 

He shouldn't have been so hard on the kid; constantly undercutting Morty’s attempts to empathize and connect with his grandfather; constantly undermining any sense of meaning the teen attempted to give their relationship. 

Une had called it immature—_single-minded _ — saying Rick was unable and unwilling to change while everyone around him grew, but what the hell did it know? Unity had only put Rick at the center of their existence _ because _he was powerful, and then it wanted him to give that power up for the benefit of the whole? Yeah, right (utilitarianism had never really been his kink). 

At least, when it came to dating the hive-mind entity, Rick had been a little more _ into _the idea of being totally dominated by another lifeform. Or, at least, gaining the power of a god by proxy. They had been mutually intoxicated by the vicarious rush of their mutually destructive relationship, and in hive-sight, Rick’s relationship with radioactive portals had been a comparatively healthier phase of life for him to jump into. 

When it came to dealing with their collective fuck up, Morty. Rick’s strategy was a finely-tuned guardedness around his grandson. He allowed himself to enjoy the surge of feel-good chemicals by proximity, while his base self-preservation mechanisms never truly allowed Rick to lower his guard around his grandson. 

He wouldn't make the same mistake twice. 

His gaze returned to Morty’s_ Best Day Ever _ and sighed. When he was _that_ big of an asshole, the least he could do was have a little empathy. He knew he shouldn't have broken their mandatory 72-hour quarantine to _ finally _ go out for ice cream, but somewhere during the late morning hours, Rick realized that today might be their last _ Normie Rockwell _moment of idyllic quality time spent together. 

Triumphant and bittersweet over the realization, Rick regretted spending so many hours working alone in his lab. He wasn't really ready to send Morty home either, but he needed to be. 

His lips tightened, and leaning over in silent apology, Rick took a sip of the dumb milkshake from Morty’s straw. Claiming a wafer for himself, he used the cookie to shovel a large scoop of ice cream into his mouth; it was easier than figuring out what to say.

The vanilla actually tasted pretty damn good. Just like he'd remembered it.

"I guess, a little bit of ice cream isn’t gonna kill ya...except for...remember that time Jerry fucking—ate my Cherry Garcia after I told him that it’d literally turn him into the Grateful Dead?”

Rick reached for a second wafer, and Morty’s lips tugged into a slight smile at the gesture. His nose twitched over the sugar and cream with newfound interest as Rick gave the teen his best effort at making their remaining time qualitative. 

“Yeah Morty, you know the nice thing about ice cream is that it’s uh, it’s ice cold. It’s cold on your tongue. It’s delicious. ‘N’ sorta just slimes down the back of your throat.” 

“Yeah, It sure is, Rick," Morty agreed, sharing the milkshake with his grandfather. "I’m definitely for the delicious taste of ice cream.” 

“Y-you don’t even have to swallow, Morty! You can kind of just like- gar— you know, like—garrsdsalskaja—and it just goes right down...” Rick trailed, trying to force conversation when they had nothing more to talk about. 

“It’s nice that, y’know? Places on the Citadel—th-they don’t ban you for...what was it that you did at the Coldstone? Back on… Earth.”

“Uh, well, the thing about being blackout drunk.” Rick unscrewed the cap to his flask, nursing it, apprehensive of the topic his grandson’s voice steered toward, and weightedly settled on, “You usually don't remember it, Morty.” 

“Oh… Rick, I—I gotta tell you something important," Morty began, staring at his hands beneath the table, guilt preemptively bleeding into his cheeks. He swallowed his lips, momentarily wrestling with his thoughts before suddenly spilling them. 

"I—I don't wanna go home!"

Rick pretended to take another sip of Morty's milkshake. They couldn't exactly talk about this in public. He lowered his voice in warning and spoke under his breath. 

"What do you mean you _ don't wanna go home. _"

Morty looked visibly upset, not knowing where to even begin with his explanation, he stared at his hands on the table. His body shuddered as mumbling starts and stops fell from his lips.

"Well—I dunno, Rick… I mean I—I just. I don't! Okay?" 

"Well, you're too late, Morty.” The milkshake suddenly left a sour, curdled taste in his mouth. Morty had known, that there was no going back. 

"It's too late for you to pull this shit." 

The silence was thick and hard to swallow. 

“I just. I've been thinking. I don’t think it’s—” 

"—Morty.” Rick negotiated, “You're spending the best years of your life, here on the Citadel, and It’s—I'm not exactly the reckless teenager I used to be, Morty—" 

"—It's okay that you're not… my age, grandpa Rick. I mean—"

“—No, Morty, that’s not...” Rick’s stomach unsettlingly stirred in silence. “I’m saying. We talked about this. What about the life on Earth you missed out on—are missing out on—because of me?"

"I dunno,” Morty shrugged his shoulders and confessed. “It's just not that important to me anymore." 

“Morty—”

Rick's stomach began to churn, and he felt suddenly and inexplicably nauseous. He’d ingested too much alcohol before, but he was well under his limit, wanting to make an effort to be on the sober side of their quality time today (and in the last month or so, feeling like he needed to keep his guard up). 

"Grandpa Rick, are you okay?"

Rick glanced at the table, noticing that his own hands were visibly shaking. Morty said something about him looking pale, but Rick didn’t hear it in entirety. The bright colors of the diner flared and swam in his organic retina melding into a soft ringing sensation in his ears. 

Something was wrong. The taste of bile saturated his tongue. 

He rose from the table, frantically searching for the fastest way out of the Morty-Hop, and jolted forward. An oblivious Shorty blocked his way, and without hesitation, Rick rolled the Morty aside without time to explain, but it was already too late. 

Alcohol-laced stomach-acid and sour milk made its way out of his mouth, and to the horror of the Ricks and Mortys enjoying their vanilla outing, Rick spewed a thick stream of vomit onto his grandson’s chest and their enclosed diner booth. The surrounding Shortys screamed and scattered away from him. 

_Fuck._ Rick heaved once more, momentarily thankful the body fluid had landed on Mortys shirt, and not his face. 

"Aw jeez, Rick,” Morty panicked, eyes wide, “Do you—do you need to go to the bathroom?" 

Rick flipped Morty off as he continued to sarcastically retch, “Yeah—Lemme. Just stop actively projectile vomiting. Didn’t—didn’t know there was a bathroom, Morty. Didn't know that was an option.”

His face snapped to the Shorty he had pushed aside; acid burning in his throat and nose. 

“Jump to it! Do the Loco-Motion, or whatever!" He felt another wave building as his muscles rolled and spasmed to regain control. "Get me a bucket!”

The jukebox chimed, processing the song request, and Rick held his stomach in renewed repulsion. 

  


Rick hurled a second time. Folding a hand over his jaw, he successfully trapped the fluid in his swollen cheeks and forced it back down with a hard-fought swallow. He grimaced and hacked once more, hurriedly taking a swig of his flask to wash the taste from his mouth. 

"Aw Jeez, Greaser Rick. I think I’m...” 

Rick glanced up to make eye contact with a Soda Jerk Morty behind the server counter. The teen’s hands were similarly holding his stomach; the round face, pale with a silent, glossed over gaze of concentration. His voice grew quiet in knowing fear.

“I think I'm. I’m gonna yakety yak—"

The jukebox changed tunes again, as the Morty projectile vomited onto the soda station, setting off an immediate chain reaction among Shortys and customers alike. 

  


Unable to skate across the lubricated surface, the Mortys hopped, skidded, tumbled, and crashed, while continuing to spew over the nostalgic walls and tables as they tried to regain control of the situation.

Desperate to leave the escalating situation before he was identified as_ index patient zero,_ Rick searched out Morty through the commotion. His grandson hadn't moved. Instead, he'd leaned himself against the booth wall with half-lidded gaze, and was chewing on his bottom lip; rubbing Rick’s expelled body fluids across his chest. 

Apparently, his grandson had just discovered a kink he never knew he had, and was lost to the multiverse, exploring it. 

"Dammit, Morty. Get that shirt off!"

Morty never knew he had it, because not counting alcohol poisoning, Rick Sanchez _ didn’t _vomit. 

"Aw jeez, Rick. H-here?" Morty’s attention snapped to Rick with a flush of embarrassment. Across the diner, Greaser Rick had removed his leather jacket and was making his way toward their table, popping his knuckles. 

"—Unless you folks wanna rumble, you better get your un-American fetish outta here!” 

“Un-American? Oh _ Fuck Me!” _ Rick exclaimed at his still in-character counterpart, "This place practically screams _ commie with daddy issues!"_

Trying to keep up, the jukebox played it’s best technological guess. 

  


An abnormal amount of spit filled Rick’s mouth, and he made a point to spit it on the floor. His breathing grew labored, and he gasped, wiping away a layer of sweat. He shed his lab coat, tossing it to his grandson to keep his contaminated hands busy. 

He was burning up._ That wasn’t a good sign._ He grabbed Morty at the clean wrist and moved to drag him out of the diner. 

"Aw jeez Rick, do you think they could get—"

"—C’mon!" Rick silenced his grandson with a hard tug as the greaser called after them. 

Hopefully, Greaser Rick would sterilize the place with a plumbus. If he was infectious, and anyone had been exposed, the CDC would get wind of whatever outbreak would follow soon enough—hopefully before the place became a late-night, double-feature pandemic shit-show. 

***

  


Although he'd hurled the little contents it'd had, Rick's stomach still churned with nausea. He'd been running a low-level fever since the pair had returned from the diner, and the scientist had spent the late hours of the morning warding off a hangover while his body and mind went into damage control. 

He pressed his fingers against his lymph nodes, swollen with overproduction, and swallowed. His throat was burning. A combination of the earlier stomach acid burning his raw flesh, and general tissue inflammation. His tongue, annoyingly swollen. Stuck to the dehydrated roof of his mouth. His cheeks tasted like cotton.

Rick took a sip of _ liquid cough drop _from his flask, and skimmed the results of the citadel rapid diagnostic test, determined to figure out what the fuck was happening to him. The data filtered onto his lens, causing the scientist to furrow his brow in frustration: the results were only leading him to more unanswered questions. 

He gestured the data onto the larger plasma screen next to his lab assistant, inviting the teen to take a look. The SEM image of a large spherical shape, covered in protein spikes filled the space of the screen, and Morty's eyes widened at the alien lifeform. 

“—Holy fucking shit-balls, Morty!” Rick exclaimed with a goading panic, and Morty immediately emulated his reaction. His eyes blew wide and his mouth fell open with a gasp.

“Oh no! Aw Jeez, Rick, what is it? Is it bad?” 

“Nah," Rick laughed at Morty's reaction, "just needed a good laugh.” 

He’d contracted the flu. The _ fucking Rhinovirus from Earth. _

"Yep. I just caught the common cold, Morty." 

Morty’s suddenly panicked expression relaxed, and for a moment, Rick envied his grandson. Clearly, the youth didn’t understand the larger implications. 

"Oh, that’s good, I mean.” Morty shuffled around in place for a moment, hastily correcting himself. “N-not all good. You’re still sick, but the others at the diner? They’re not—they’re not gonna get contaminated or anything. They’re gonna be okay?" 

Morty carefully raised the tone of his assessment, searching for the scientist’s confidence. 

Rick thought of the nostalgic diner. Like misplaced optimism that the scientist had abandoned in the ’50s, utilitarianism was a bit too idealistic without considering the practical application of survival instinct; the individual high of being able to survive nuclear fallout. 

On the Citadel, the concept of _ choosing to maximize happiness _ toward his infinite selves was entirely and infinitely moot: happiness on the central finite curve was only as valuable to a Rick, as it was measurable, and in that sense, Rick _ could _quantify—with certainty—what Morty had given him, and it was why he dragged the teen back to his lab, prioritizing his grandson’s safety over the entire Citadel’s. 

Whatever potentially infectious pathogen they’d left contaminating the atmosphere of that diner really wasn’t their problem, but Rick sympathetically smiled, and in a protective, paternalistic gesture, reached out to ruffle Morty’s hair. 

“Don’t even trip, Morty. They’ll be fine.” 

“Aw Jeez.” Morty’s face flushed at the affectionate contact, shifting his attention where Rick wanted it. “Wh-what about you?” 

Rick liked using his grandson as a sounding board, however. Having to explain things to his lab assistant from the ground up often allowed Rick the chance of extensive reevaluation. Despite what Earth had continuously reinforced, Morty _ wasn't _ dumb. The kid had an intuitive talent for synthesis. Seeing connections between the fragmented pieces in Rick's universe of knowledge. 

“I’m not a confirmed case for anything besides the flu, yet.” He led the teen’s naturally inquisitive nature with an ambiguous statement, “But organisms will take every opportunity you offer ‘em, Morty.”

"Is there some sort of medicine—" 

Rick interrupted, lifting his flask between them and gave it a confident shake, “With the flu, you can really only treat the symptoms, Morty. Gotta let the virus run its course and in the meantime, try not to let the body overwork itself to the point of being susceptible to secondary infections.” 

Returning his gaze to the screen, Rick frowned, deliberating what to do about the Earth disease known for taking out the elderly. More concerning than how best to treat the symptoms was that the _common flu_ had just overpowered his radioactive immune system. He further explained to his lab assistant, evading direct answers. 

“I'm running a fever, Morty. _ I’m sick._ My immune defenses are responding to whatever's in my body that it doesn't like, 'N' I have a very specific window to figure some shit out. Starting with you.” 

Rick wheeled away from his computer, leading Morty to an examination table. Taking precaution, he snapped on a pair of nitrile gloves and patted the cold metallic surface. 

“C’mon, hop up.” He attempted to mask the urgency in his voice as excitement, “I need to run a few more tests. Gonna need some of your DNA.” 

Morty climbed onto the table and visibly shivered before reaching down toward his pants to voluntarily tug at his zipper. Rick placed a hand on his grandson’s shoulder, halting the teen’s actions. He growled in irritation, pinching his thumb and forefinger into the bridge of his nose. 

“Your spit, Morty! Jeezus, check your amygdala.” He moved his fingers to massage his burning temples, trying to focus despite the 100-degree body temperature and building headache. “Th-this isn’t—_ feed me, Morty _shop of horrors!” 

Rick pivoted in his chair, grabbing a large cotton swab, a packaged syringe, and a few other items from the various drawers and shelves. Morty gulped as the scientist returned, placing them on the metal tray beside the examination table. 

Working in an efficient fluid motion, Rick leaned forward into the teen’s space. Without warning, the warm press of his palm settled against Morty’s chin, and the clinical cornstarch smell of latex gloves sterilized the teen’s senses. A thumb and finger impatiently pinched his cheeks. 

"Open." Rick’s abrasive voice instructed, and without thought, Morty instinctively obeyed. His lips parted, and his grandfather not-so-gently jammed the giant ear cleaner into the back of his throat. Morty gagged, feeling the walls of his throat constrict around the foreign object. 

Placing the swab in a vial, Rick immediately continued to the next task. He pivoted back to the examination table with a large rubber band. He plucked Morty’s arm up by the elbow, maneuvering it to an easier position for him to work with. 

He worked in silence, quickly tying the large elastic band around his grandson’s bicep, before reaching for a bottle of iodine. He tipped the brown liquid onto a large cotton ball, and his fingers dug into the flesh of Morty’s forearm as he rubbed it onto the injection site.

Rick balled Morty’s fingers into a fist, tightening his hand around them in a silent request for Morty to maintain a consistent amount of pressure. With a meticulous, unbroken concentration, the scientist searched out the purplish veins that had began to visibly swell beneath the surface of Morty’s skin. 

In the silence of the lab, Morty felt each moment pulsing between them: Rick breathed against Morty’s arm as he worked, and Morty listened to the rhythmic ebb and flow of their breath. He inhaled a sharp gasp of air as Rick’s fingers suddenly constricted around his skin, choosing the vein he would penetrate. Morty’s skin flushed in embarrassment; helpless to the way his body intuitively responded to his grandfather's touch. 

His skin warmed, stirring to life as blood traveled and pooled into his sex organ. It swelled until it was erect with an overwhelming sensation of desire; the friction of pressing his body’s insistent will against the fabric of his jeans left Morty’s hand white-knuckling the edges of the examination table, clenching his fist tightly with his other. He briefly closed his eyes, and the current pulsing throughout his entire body ecstatically ignited as Rick touched the cold metallic tip of the needle against his skin. 

“Aw Jeez, don’t blow out my veins again, grandpa Rick.” Morty breathed, half-heartedly joking at the remembrance. His grandfather took offense but left the airy tone of Morty’s voice unchallenged. Instead, he cocked his eyebrow at the teen’s flushed, half-lidded gaze in silent judgment. 

"Too much to drink that night.” The scientist matter-of-fact defended his work, “Didn’t have the fine-motor control I have now." 

Morty bit his lip to stay focused as the continuous thread of their cyclical breath swallowed his senses. The surrounding silent atmosphere had grown heavy and thick between them, lingering with dark intentions. 

He wanted to open his body to Rick.

The pinch of nerves alerted his body to a physical breach, and a soft cry escaped Morty’s lips. He held his breath, watching the hollow tip of the needle dip beneath the surface of his skin, and cried out again feeling the second sharp penetration into his vein. He groaned as his grandfather released the building pressure of the rubber band, sending his blood surging forward through his body. He relaxed his hand in a pleasured release of tension.

The feeling of lust was dizzying, and Morty worked to calm himself down as Rick siphoned the blood from Morty’s body. He watched the procedure in silence, not wanting to interrupt the scientist’s work. In the silence of the lab, it was easy to feel like they were alone together in the Citadel. That they would always be connected by a seemingly invisible, pulsing thread of life. 

Rick exhaled as Morty inhaled; the older man’s breath fell with strange intimacy against the teen’s face and neck, and he bathed in it. The concentrated smell was expectantly pungent, but laced like arsenic along the fermented edges of Rick’s signature aged scent, the sweet smell of cocoa invitingly lingered on the scientist’s lips. 

Morty licked his own in unspoken desire, before averting his gaze with a sudden feeling of shame. He stared absently toward the filling vial of blood, and his thoughts swelled with a sudden, urgent hope. 

He broke the silence between them. 

“Maybe I’m…” Morty began with cautious optimism. He stared at his grandfather, waiting for the older man to lift his head, “What if I’m infected too, Rick?” 

Not glancing up from the task-at-hand, Rick withdrew the metallic tip of the needle from Morty’s skin, causing the boy to cry out with another sharp pinch. Rick sighed, and speaking in-between a string of actions, he pressed a cotton ball into the teen’s arm to stop the bleeding. An irritated, tired tone bubbled in the edge of his voice. 

“What do you mean,_ maybe you’re infected, _ Morty?” 

Ricks gloved fingers wrapped around Morty's arm, holding it in place as the older man’s torso turned to the side. Working with his free hand, Rick keyed something into an interface, invisible to the teen. Morty’s hand fell over his grandfather’s gloved fingers, shaking with the rush of courage flooding his veins at the physical contact. 

The pressure of Rick’s thumb mounted as it pressed into the cotton ball, waiting for Morty to speak.

“At the diner. When we were talking about love potions... d-do you think some sort of chemical thing could’ve happened inside my brain, y’know? Like the type of thing where I fall in love with… someone I shouldn’t, and start having...sexual thoughts about them?”

Rick’s lips thinned into a tight line as he struggled to respond. Instinctively defensive, his hand suddenly tensed, and withdrew from the teen’s arm. He stored the vials of blood for safekeeping, disposing of the rest of the materials into the hazardous waste bin. 

He removed the gloves from his hand, discarding them with the rest of the contaminated materials, before reaching into the lining of his lab coat for his flask. He took a long pull, and using the sleeve of his uniform, wiped the dripping body fluid away. 

Morty held his breath, regretting that he might have said something too obvious. Too revealing. Once the fragile illusion between them was shattered, neither would be able to go back to whatever it had been before. 

Finally, Rick spoke.

“Does it matter?” He firmly challenged, “In this _ purely hypothetical _ situation, Morty, you’d be completely oblivious to it. Y-you'd continue thinking you’re a normal everyday human and you—you’d likely never discover the microscopic lifeforms that have been living inside of you all along, you’d never know they were subtly influencing and changing your thoughts and behaviors.”

Morty persisted. There needed to be something wrong with him. It there wasn’t anything wrong with him, Rick would make him go back to Earth. 

“But wh-what about—like, the pollen on those alien planets. Y’know? The kind that makes you like, sex-crazed? What if. Maybe the forest—” 

“—Morty,_ you’re a teenager! _ Been watching too much porn. What you're talking about? It’s not some kind of Cronenberg parasite that propagates itself through some sort of fuck-or-die venereal disease kind of shit.—I mean, yeah, biology is pretty much a _ fuck and not die _ process, but _ obviously _it’s a bit more complicated than that— y-you’re misconstruing it with your dick.” 

Rubbing a pair of fingers against his eye, Rick took another sip of his flask as he tried to further explain, and Morty bit the inside of his cheek, tightening his grip over his arm as he listened to the impromptu lecture, laced with poisonous overtones of warning.

“Y-you like the equalizing idea around it, Morty. Because some sort of alien sex pollen would make you sexually uninhibited—but more than that, you’re attracted to the idea that it would make _ you _uninhibitedly sexually acceptable to someone else, specifically me.”

“Aw Jeez, Rick I—” Morty flushed in embarrassment and tried to defend himself, but waving a dismissive hand in the teen’s direction, Rick cut him off, and continued, “—‘N’ while that lack of inhibition is a nice idea for a fantasy, outside of the silver screen, _ I lived _ through the AIDS scare when that whole genre was invented. I dunno how comfortable you’d really be with trading off your ideas of free will. Your ability to even consent.” The scientist bitterly laughed.

“But—” Morty attempted once more, and his grandfather immediately spoke over him; the authoritative paternalistic tone of his voice, climbing. 

“—So unless you wanna existential mindfuck identity crisis, Morty. My answer is: _ don’t think about it. _” 

The atmosphere between them shifted, and with Rick’s familiar phrase, Morty understood that their conversation was over. 

Frowning, he pulled the cotton ball from his arm, and stared at the dark red dot of his blood; dead and dried after having left his body. He hopped down from the examination table, balling the piece of cotton in his fist and gave his final effort in a losing argument. 

“...I thought you said consent didn’t exist out here.” 

“_ I said _ it doesn't exist with _you, _Morty,” Rick continued, the tone in his voice shifting from mild annoyance to anger. Morty knew that Rick had never wanted to be with him in such a way, but the scientists had never given his grandson a reason why, even after moving to the Citadel. 

Abandoning the conversation entirely, Rick continued with his work. He wheeled away from the examination table toward a microwave looking instrument, revealing a petri dish of blood. He lifted it against the light of the window, and Morty caught the letter M, scribbled with marker on the surface. It looked normal, as far as Morty could tell, but Rick’s eyes narrowed suspiciously toward it. 

“—By the way, Morty, I know you didn't ask or anything, but even if it was our last night on the Citadel. I'm not interested in having sex with you.” 

“I know, Rick.” Morty sighed, defeated. His jaw tightened as the words pressed through his gritted teeth. Rick's breath was as rancid as his shitty attitude.

“Good, cause this adventure’s over, Morty. A-as soon as this portal fluid stabilizes, and I’m sure you’re not gonna space-pox Earth, It’s time for you to go home.” 

Morty’s chest tightened in panic. He could hear the blood rushing behind his ear; into his thoughts. The fluorescent lights of the lab flared overhead, and the world muted around him until all that remained was a steady ringing tone in his ear. 

"NO!” He held his hands over his ears, clenching his eyes shut. “I'm not going home!" 

Maybe there _ was _something wrong with him, after all. 

Rick didn’t verbally challenge Morty’s sudden tantrum, but he folded his arms and frowned in disagreement. He dismissed the teen’s outburst, returning to his work. 

From the inside of the glass room, Morty stared, watching his grandfather work for a few silent moments before storming out of the lab without being heard. 

***

  


Following their argument, Morty had spent the afternoon angrily shoving articles of clothing into a duffel bag. He would run away— make the choice to disappear among his endless counterparts in Silver Palm or Morty Town— before Rick could push him through some portal against his will. 

There was nothing left for Morty in his home dimension. 

He didn’t want to go back to Earth, and Morty hated that he’d ever agreed to the idea when Rick had first brought it up. It hadn’t been a permanent decision then, but somehow, Rick had twisted their original conversation to mean what he had wanted it to. Just like he always had. 

It was what Rick had wanted for Morty; not what the teen had wanted for himself. As smart as the scientist thought himself to be, Rick didn’t always know what was best for his grandson—how could he—when he refused to ever see the teen on equal ground. 

Life on the Citadel had been as restrictive as it had been on Earth. No matter where Morty was, Rick, and every other adult, would only ever see him as_ just a dumb teenager. _

Even if that was true. Even if he was young and stupid. Morty still knew what he wanted. 

The sound of breaking glass shattered through the high-rise, and pulled from his thoughts, Morty rose to his feet. He followed the dangerous sound into the lab.

***

Once, Rick had blacked out while working with some blue acid in the lab. Morty had been standing beside Rick when he’d dropped it, and the resulting chemical spill had sent them flying into a hallucinogenic trip that lasted for three straight days—until the OSHIT team was able to decontaminate the area. Rick complained about the invoice for months.

Naturally, Rick blamed it on Morty, and since that incident, the teen had felt an irrational responsibility bordering a sense of ownership for his grandfather’s actions on the Citadel. It was his job to make sure the scientist was working (and drinking) responsibly. 

He found his grandfather passed out on the clock. His thin frame slumped in sharp points over his workstation, alcoholic’s flask in hand. Although the piece of lab equipment on the floor was in pieces, it had been empty, and Morty sighed in relief as he approached his grandfather’s mess. 

After they had returned from the diner, Rick had enforced a no-contact protocol until he could run a few more tests, but Morty wasn’t worried. He didn’t care if he caught Rick’s cold. 

Maybe catching it would buy him more time. 

“Grandpa Rick.” Still upset toward his grandfather, Morty nudged at Rick’s arm, causing the man to grimace and stir. His already pale skin had turned ashen, and his body was covered in sweat. Morty frowned. 

“Mmmmorty,” Rick slurred irritated recognition of his presence. 

“Aw jeez. I think you're working too hard.” Morty dipped his head beneath Rick’s arm, lifting the older man from his work stool and pulling him in the direction of his small cot. “You’re sick, Grandpa Rick. Maybe you should, y’know? Take a break?” 

Rick mumbled an inaudible phrase that sounded like reluctance, and the pair stumbled toward the designated resting place. Morty wanted to carry Rick to his bedroom, but there was no way he could manage moving the weight of his grandfather that far. Rick wrapped a tight arm around Morty’s neck and shoulders, causing the teen’s anger to momentarily fade.

He understood why his grandfather was so hard on him: the scientist had always blamed himself for bringing Morty to the Citadel. He was trying to convince Morty to leave by pushing the teen away. 

If Morty hadn’t known his grandfather since birth, maybe he would have believed him. Rick could be really convincing sometimes. 

“Hey, Grandpa Rick.” Morty returned his attention to the drunken scientist, “Maybe... I don’t tell you this enough. But I love you. And uh, you need to take better care of yourself.” 

“Ugh. Dumb!” Rick exasperated with a huffy groan, rousing further into consciousness. “I never —I don’t tell you this enough, Morty. But you’re a stupid—you’re a parasite. We’re supposed to be no contact right now. Dumbass...” Rick trailed his mumbled expletives into inaudible drunken rambling. 

Morty narrowed his eyes toward his unappreciative grandfather, anger returning. “Yeah, well, look where being smart got you?” 

“Uggghhhh.” Rick gave up on the argument, letting his body fall onto the army cot with a springy bounce. He groaned once more, after blowing his nose into the inner lining of his jacket. Morty’s lip curled in a grimace as he left his grandfather to search out the lab’s _ pharmacy. _

He returned with a bucket, a bottle of aspirin, a glass of water, and his grandfather’s flask, placing them in a visible location for whenever Rick decided to wake up. Rick wouldn’t say thank you, but Morty didn’t need him to. 

Even back on Earth, it was how things had always been. For reasons beyond his comprehension, Morty had always been the object of the scientist’s fascination. Rick listened to Morty more than anyone else in the Smith family, and Morty was somehow able to get through Rick’s impossibly thick skull when no one else could. 

Eventually, the alcoholic, mad-scientist, grandpa who nobody wanted to deal with, became Morty’s responsibility. 

Becoming Rick’s lab assistant was just another requirement of his full-time job.

Rick needed Morty just as much—if not more than Morty needed him. If anything, Morty had been the one taking care of his grandfather, not the other way around. The teen glanced through the window, into the city where that truth was so painfully infinite and universal that it ached deep inside of him to recognize it.

_ Why couldn’t his grandfather see it too? _

Against the furthest wall of the lab, positioned behind a movable blast shield, a series of large vents, pipes, and wires connected to a stainless steel chamber. Inside the piece of equipment, through the small square window, Morty gazed toward the spinning amorphous form of glowing green element—portal fluid. It had further stabilized, looking less like fog, and more like quantum strands of nuclear pasta. 

Rick had once told Morty that the walls of the HCL were built out of the same glass Ricks used to construct their portal guns: able to withstand far more than the force of an atomic bomb. Morty had never liked the idea of Rick essentially living and working on the other side of a glass bunker, and he often woke to nightmares of Rick being eviscerated into sub-atomic pieces by some sort of freak accident, while Morty, on the other side of the safety glass, could only helplessly watch. 

He stared at the lethal glow of the unstable material. Strands of light vibrated in brilliant shocks, virulently dancing through the eerie green clouds of the containment chamber. He placed his hand on the glass window, and the material crackled, startling the teen to jump backward. 

Their high-rise was located in one of the most densely populated areas of the Tourist District. Accidental or not, an explosion could be devastating. Morty understood why such safety measures were a necessary part of the HCL. 

His eyes shifted to his grandfather, who had drunkenly dozed off, before returning to the chamber of portal fluid. A large red steering wheel poked from the door of the chamber, and next to it, the pyramid shape of a highly visible OSHIT sign mounted over a large red button. The words_ ‘Eliminate Hazardous Waste’ _ inscribed around its base. 

When working with dangerous materials, Rick had often used it like a garbage disposal. 

Morty wondered if pressing it now would send the dangerous material back to the dangerous forest where it belonged. 

Morty wasn’t going home, but deep down, he knew he wasn’t going to run away, either. Reaching out his hand, he caressed the slick mushroom-top edges of the button. He held his breath and pressed down. A holo screen flashed into view. 

[PASSCODE: _ _ _ _ _ ]

Morty sighed, canceling the request. Of course, his grandfather had password protected it. Portal fluid was only the most important thing to him. To all Ricks. It was only a matter of time before he used it to get rid of him. 

Morty returned his gaze to his grandfather. Rick didn’t seem like he had the energy or strength to make Morty do anything, at least not anytime soon. Momentarily empowered by his grandfather’s weakened state, Morty retrieved a broom. 

The clock over the doorway to the HCL entrance read ten minutes to midnight. A heavy bold line pointed in warning over the second of four large dots; he shouldn’t be here.

Morty ignored the time and went to work, cleaning up the pieces of broken glass and the rest of the materials strewn throughout the lab. 

***

  


It felt like Rick had screamed the tissues of his throat raw while he slept. 

He swallowed the nightmarish quality of waiting for answers that in all likelihood might not be found (at least, not by him, not in time for him), but with no other options, Rick waited for the next round of tests to be completed. 

His organic eye burned, itching and watering as he searched the plasma screens for new information from old data. After a few moments of reading, the words disorientingly swam around him, head pounding with each processed thought. The aspirin Morty had left him hadn’t done shit. 

Rick worked through his bodily fatigue, pushing himself to find an answer. He kept reading.

_ Something _was wrong. Rick felt it, aching in the marrow of his bones as his compromised brainwaves struggled to catch up with his intuition. 

His intake levels hadn’t changed, but it felt like his body was going through alcohol withdrawal. He was starving, yet he vomited at the sight of food. He’d woken up in a puddle of his own sweat, and his body ached with each small movement as the lab worker attempted to pull himself out of his army cot and return to work. His sense of smell had become overwhelmingly, repulsively sensitive to the materials in the lab, and his normally steady hands incessantly shook. 

Even at a lower cognitive capacity, it would be hard for the scientist to _ not _to see the symptoms. 

“Morty!” Rick pressed the button of the HCL’s PA system, anxiously shouting for his grandson. He was still irritated with his lab assistant for making him take a nap when he had work to do. Losing a full shift to sleep _ had _given Rick a slight boost of energy, but after only a few mediocre hours of work, his thoughts had once more slowed to an obstinate crawl. He kept losing his sense of time and had been intermittently blacking-out and coming-to as he worked. 

He didn’t want Morty’s assistance in the lab, but he needed it. 

Most concerning on the list of symptoms was Rick’s sudden swing into hypersexual stimulation. The scientist had woken to a clean workspace, all of his stations prepped and ready to use, but the moment of short-lived gratitude toward his grandson was quickly replaced by a visceral sensation that overwhelmed the reward pathways of his aging body. 

The scientist could only categorize it as completely irrational—an acute physical and mental arousal that he recognized. He hadn’t experienced a rush like that in years, and instead of thanking Morty for his work, Rick had sent the potential contaminant away from his quarantined space. He didn't have the energy to explain, especially when explaining would mean telling Morty that Rick didn’t fully know what was happening. To either of them. 

With each test, Morty, who remained unaffected, became more and more suspect.

He needed more time. 

He didn’t have enough of it to waste examining his emotions under a microscope, and there was too much of a speculative range for any sense of panic or fear to be productive. Aside from that, his emotions had grown volatile, if the pathogen had begun compromising his amygdala, he didn’t want to feed an irrational fear response.

He only had enough time to focus on the immediate task at hand. The next test. The next step. The aspects of a potentially life-threatening situation that he could still control. 

His frown deepened as he reviewed the list of classified bacteria and viruses from the forest. Rick had tested for all potential matches, but he still hadn’t characterized whatever had infected him. His leading hypothesis was either _ phenomenal fucking timing _ with separate, isolated incidents of pathogens, each independent from one another, or a perfect storm of variables: mother nature, coming together to _ Rigity-fucking-reck _ him. 

During the precious hours he had slept, his hyperactive immune system had gone rogue: losing its ability to distinguish alien from human cells. Already turning on itself, his immune system—in some last-ditch blaze of glory—decided to detonate the equivalent of nuclear bombs throughout his entire body. The resulting cytokine storm was currently wreaking havoc on everything, good and bad, and would leave a mess of fluid and inflammation sitting in his lungs, ripe for secondary infections.

The lab worker opened his cybernetic inbox and briefly considered reaching out to E-404, a known hacker who could easily gain access to additional databases that were above his BS clearance. But even if he was willing to gamble the time to schedule, attend, and negotiate a meeting and price, the potential data carried no guarantee of any definitive answers. 

Holding illegal portal fluid was another issue. Rick needed to keep his profile—especially of the criminal nature—as low as possible. Citadel authorities had likely already been alerted of a biological breach of the forest’s membrane and had anything come out of their dine-n-dash, Rick didn’t want to risk cluing any other version of himself in on his and Morty’s recent whereabouts. 

He wasn’t the only Rick smart enough to know _ what _was in the forest, just the only Rick stupid enough to take the risk to get it. There were other channels of obtaining bootleg portal fluid on the Citadel, but his strategy had seemed comparatively flawless in execution. 

He’d forgotten to account for Morty’s Law: _ anything the kid could fuck up, he would. _

He deleted the unfinished digital communication to his hacker counterpart. The safest course of action would be to independently continue compiling his own database. He could use it as leverage, or sell it in a crypto-vault for some quick black-market blemflarks. In the meantime, Rick would have his equipment running further analysis, continuing to develop vaccinations for anything on the unclassified list deemed malevolent.

“Morty!” He pressed the PA button again with building impatience and rose from his workstation intending to gather the materials for himself. He stepped forward on his feet, and the surrounding lab dizzyingly rushed into his senses as he stumbled to the floor. 

***

Rick woke to find Morty hovering above him. His expression was worn down and tired, but he reached down to pull his grandfather from the lab floor. Rick wrapped his arms around the youth, pressing his nose against the teen’s neck as his body was hoisted upwards. The teen’s clothing was saturated with the accumulated layers of rank hormonal body odor and even more useless deodorant. The two smells came together, layered over an array of other dried and crusty scents, to create something even more repulsive: the signature smell of his pubescent grandson. 

Rick wondered how many days it had been since he’d changed his shirt. He buried his nose into the fabric and inhaled deep, allowing the familiar sensations of comfort and relief to wash over him. The throbbing inside his skull died down, and his senses momentarily returned to him as Morty escorted Rick back to his stool. 

“Ugh, when was the last time you took a shower.” He settled onto his seat pushing Morty away from him. “You smell like teen spirit.” 

Rick rested his elbows on the surface of the workstation and detailed the instructions to his grandson, who gathered materials for a self-administered IV. Rick lazily cut the sleeve of his blue sweater away, and from his flask, poured a bit of vodka over his bicep to sterilize. 

He willed himself to focus, stabilizing his shaking hand long enough to insert the PICC line into his vein, asking his lab assistant to tape it securely onto his arm. He hooked up some sodium chloride to one of the dangling lumens, and satisfied with the temporary solution, Rick hung his new external organ over a piece of lab equipment, slumping back onto the surface of his work table. With a groan, he nested his head in his arms and waited for his strength to return.

"Aw Jeez, Grandpa Rick, maybe, y’know? Maybe we should go to the CHC? It’s just a few blocks away." 

It wasn’t Morty’s fault he was oblivious to why that wasn't an option. He groaned at the suggestion. 

"Hospitals only work when they know how to treat something, Morty. Wh-whatever I’ve got,_ it came from the final frontier. It's Unclassified. _" 

"Well, maybe they can, I dunno, make sure it doesn't get worse? I mean. You’ve been blacking out—a lot more than you usually do. I’m getting— I’m starting to worry.” 

"Assuming they're smart enough to run the necessary tests, Morty. They'd quarantine us faster than a black man carrying EVD across the Texan border. Standard protocol on the Citadel: it's the only way to effectively suppress an outbreak in this petri dish."

“I dunno, Rick. I still think maybe we should go—” 

“—I'm sorry, a-are you the Scientist, Morty? Or are you the horny-fucking-teenager who just wanted his grandfather’s dick—what a piece of DNA.” 

Rick hissed, pressing fingers into his temple, frustrated with his disintegrating filter. He had run out of bedside manner and didn’t have the time or energy to accommodate his grandson. Morty stood, dumbstruck at the sudden verbal attack, and his face flushed red as he sputtered, attempting to deny the painfully obvious. It only infuriated Rick more. 

“I uh, that’s not. I mean—” 

“—Oh, you're gonna try to take the high road, now? Y-y-y-y-you're a little creep! I-I’m not going to the CHC, Morty. Y-you're a, you're—you're—you're just a little parasite. A creepy… creep person. Too much mystery with no obvious threat. You wanna know what I think? About you wanting grandpa to take care of you—wh-with his seventy-year-old dick up your ass? The only thing getting hard is my arteries!” 

“I don’t want you to fuck me!” Morty suddenly protested “I —” 

“—Y-you sure Morty? We are all equal in the flesh. Y-you don’t wanna Cronenberg this shit up and tackle some of that repressed psychological shit? I’m offering the kind of breakthrough people pay top dollar for.” 

“I uh…Aw Jeez, Grandpa Rick. I—I think...Is this a test?” Morty's face had flushed a deep red as he stammered, and shamefully shifted in place. He was sincerely considering his grandfather’s offer. Rick gritted his teeth, feeling his body respond. Despite the exhaustion, it stirred in arousal. 

“—You’re a pubescent little shit, Morty,” Rick angrily dismissed. 

Morty didn’t understand the larger implications, but it didn’t take a genius to figure it out. 

“You’re transitioning into an adult, but you don’t get it. Sex? It’s a rite of passage in your… dumb, biological development, but it’s just another—another life step on the way to death. ‘N’ once you enter that new stage of life? Y-you can’t go back, Morty. You can’t_ un-change _ it.” 

Morty’s gaze lifted upward to Rick’s increasingly lucid demeanor. His eyes flicked toward Morty, before retreating to his lab. “Your youth—childhood? I can’t ever give those things back to you, Morty. And you—don’t you think I’ve taken enough from you already?” 

The silence was electric between them. 

Ricks’s breath fell from his chest, heavy and labored as Morty ignored him, listening instead to the quiet hum of his lab equipment. He stared hard at the silent blinking lights, deep in thought, before deciding to share his honest thoughts. 

"I want to give it to you—” Rick rose from his stool, interrupting the teen. Still tethered to his workstation, the scientist leaned into Morty’s personal space, towering over his grandson in admonition. 

“—What_ you want,_ Morty?” He spat the word with a condescending accusation, baring his teeth. 

The plasma blue of his eyes seared with a cauterizing intensity as he held up the glass disk of his work. Drawn like a magnet to Rick’s presence, Morty’s blood stirred to life, moving toward the edge of the dish where the scientist’s hand made contact. Rick’s grip tightened around the edges, pressing a thumb into the inscribed letter “M” until his hand shook. He sneered. 

“Your entire existence is like this petri dish, Morty. Y-you’re throwing your emotions into it. Watching it transfigure into whatever the fuck you think you wanna see. But it’s not science Morty. Whatever you project here? The-the only thing it’s ever gonna measure is your own subjectivity. The only thing it’s gonna quantify is you—you’re just looking at yourself— ‘N’ eventually, you’re gonna see own existence—and you’re gonna know who you are—Once you look through the universe with that lens? _ You can’t unsee it, Morty._ There’s no going back. So you better make damn sure _ it’s what you want.” _

Morty’s eyes narrowed toward his grandfather, and defiant, his hands balled into fists at his side. 

“You—you think you know everything, but what does that lens—that petri dish—your lab. What does it say about you, Grandpa Rick?” 

“You really wanna know, Morty?” 

Rick tossed the dish back onto the surface of his workstation, glaring at the teen. His open palm pressed against the Morty’s chest; fingers splayed themselves over his heart, before tracing upward to settle around the teen’s throat. His touch lingered for a contemplative moment, before resting beneath Morty’s jawline, eventually pinching his chin.

Breathing heavily, Rick lifted it, tilting Morty’s head. He examined the youth, watching the teen’s cheeks immediately flush beneath his gaze; blood, surging to life around his pressurized points of contact. 

“You’re just a fly on the wall of my lab. An insect, _ pretending to be _human. On a good day? I see you as an experiment. At best. On a bad day...” Rick bitterly laughed, withdrawing his hand from Morty. He returned to his stool, avoiding Mortys gaze as he spilled the hazardous truth within the safety of his lab. 

“...I’ve never seen you as anything more than a mistake.” 

Rick knew the words would land on Morty’s heart with surgical precision. His grandson needed to cut the aging man out of his life like the mutating teratoma he had become. 

Rick was certain: the youth would have never made the choice for himself. Morty processed his grandfather’s words in sterile silence, and even from a distance, the ache was visible on the teen’s expression as it crumbled.

The soft sounds of Morty’s voice cracked like broken glass as he tried to speak, and failed. Then, without warning, his sharp cries blared into an alarming wail. The teen pressed his palms into his eyes, wiping away the tears as his body wrenched itself with inconsolable sobs.

Rick’s headache returned. He buried his head in his hands and wondered how many tears his grandson would have to spill, before he would see the dangerous chemistry between them for what it was.

He listened to the siren, and did nothing. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Check out the fic endnotes, art and Lab Rick's organism database of the forest over on the [ fic page. ](https://starry-citadel-au.neocities.org/metamorphosis.html)


	3. Paradessence

Each night, as the artificial sun shifted into dusk, Mory gazed out across the Citadel skyline, watching as the humming neon horizon of Silver Palm came to life. Pixel by pixel, squares of light—from the neighboring residential high-rises to the distant silhouetted edge of the tourist district—flickered in and out of existence; momentary electric currents, signaling to one another through the otherwise darkness of the surrounding void. 

> _ “That was ‘Come together. With Love, Connection, Experience!’— One of my favorites! You’re live with Radio Rick and the lonely, late-night callers of the Citadel... What’s on our mind?” _
> 
> _ “Nothing original. I’m just another Rick. Guess you could just call it loneliness. I’m lonely—not. Not in a sexual way. I’d call Scwhifty’s hotline if that were the case— It’s an...existence kind of loneliness. Been feeling down tonight, popping pills to take the edge off. Thinking with a level of certainty that no one will be able to understand me—th-that no one understands anyone, really…” _
> 
> _ “It’s a paradoxical commonality for interdimensional counterparts, isn’t it? But here we are, calling out to one another. I'm listening, Rick. It's a cold multiverse: I’m alone—here in the dark, absent space of my radio station... I'm lonely, too.” _
> 
> _ "Thanks for the self-care, I guess." _
> 
> _ “Thanks for tuning in.” _

Alive, Silver Palm reminded Morty of the forest’s lethal beauty, and transfixed from behind the balcony’s glass railing, he studied the effulgent organism; yearning for connection with the Citadel’s culture as the saturated fluorescent colors rhythmically pulsed around him. 

The danger and beauty of the multifaceted biome reminded Morty of his grandfather: their lives endlessly rotated around an experimental radioactive axis; drawn like the insect Rick thought of him as there was only one place in the Universe Morty wanted to be. 

He couldn’t imagine life with Rick, and he couldn’t fathom an existence without him.

He wasn’t going to run away.

***

  


Rick Sanchez had run away from Earth in search of a place called home. 

Most of his life had been characterized by absurd paradoxes: he moved forward in life for the hope of a better future, but the future only ever brought him closer to death. 

The magnum opus of Rick Sanchez’s life—interdimensional time and space travel—was the same breakthrough that had made everything meaningless and obsolete. 

Floating around space—apathetically living out the absurdity of his day-to-day adventures—distracted him from the universal axiom of his existence. 

_ “Hey, baby, what’s your name—names?” _

_ “Although I am young, I no longer exist in a larval state. Regarding my name? I do not have one. If it makes linguistic communication easier, however, you may assign a name to me.” _

_ “Huh, well... your species is classified as a hive-mind: something that combines all subjectivity and objectivity in a consistent rational structure. But that doesn't tell me ‘the why’. What your purpose is.” _

_ “Species by species, my will is to unify all lifeforms. I will become the universe, and I will be what the single-minded—your species—call a god.” _

_ “Oh, that’s—fuck—that’s pretty sexy. Hey baby, Unity? Une. Listen. Why don't you start this long night of universal conquest with me? I’ve been looking for a close encounter.” _

_ “You would like to assimilate, without fighting for survival?” _

_ “I’m into some edgeplay—if you’re the type of lifeform who enjoys ‘the hunt’ or whatever, but yeah. why not? Sounds like a wild night. Wanna catch some drinks first?” _

_ “I do not drink. There’s no need for escape from the self when your world is one.” _

_ “No problem. I’m not drinking to escape. Alcohol's the great social lubricator, baby. It’s how humans assimilate.” _

When he discovered Unity, Rick studied—possibly for the first time—the beauty and meaning of existence, within and beyond himself. Their encounter created the formative years of his research, nourishing his passion for studying the science of life. 

But on an anecdotal level, through his aimlessly unfolding existence toward the inevitable, Rick would always know Unity as a sense of home; an eventual return to the void of non-existence. 

The death of self. 

He knew with their first kiss; he wouldn’t go gentle into that dark night.

It had never been just a chemical. 

It was life itself; a brief moment of young and reckless existence flickering within endless eons of their continually expanding universe. 

_ "You ever just. Look at the stars and feel like you're one with—with everything, Une? Like your existence could transcend space and time—Y'know? Like, you’re not any different—your body is unchanged, but your mind feels like it’s lived a thousand lifetimes?" _

_ “I think with our last orgasm, your single-minded existence is experiencing ego death.” _

_ “Fuck—this high is—it's better than cosmic apotheosis, Une—better than ayahuasca. Tops everything I’ve ever experimented with. I feel like our souls are united and we’re all one with eternity. I love you. I think? Maybe I am you. Maybe I’ve always been you.” _

_ “Run away in me, Rick.” _

All the young and reckless love in the universe couldn’t change the universal laws of their star-crossed existence. Their chemistry had been dangerously unstable from the moment they had tried to fall into each other. 

_ “What do you mean, you don’t know who you are anymore, Rick? You'll _ ** _never _ ** _ know who you are—because humans constantly change—especially when I change them! You’re social animals who are socially constructed. Before I met you, you were a drug addict on the verge of suicide, and now, you’re touring the galaxy with your own band!” _

_ “Yeah, thanks for the comparison to livestock, Une—I'm a work in progress, I get it. I just. I dunno, babe. Part of me just—It feels like I sold out, Okay?” _

_ “Well, maybe you’re just looking through the wrong end of the lens. If you measure the value of life through the tiny, lived experience of a single-minded cell, then you lose perspective on what the entire lifeform, working together was designed to achieve. We could achieve paradise.” _

_ “Baby, listen. Y-you’re talking about taking over planets and galaxies, you gotta… you gotta just… remember to let go sometimes, you know. You’re building some kind of stairway to heaven, but it just sounds like slavery with extra steps.” _

_ “Individuality causes conflict, Rick, and I’m working to create a place we can call home. A society without war or fear. A type-one civilization! We could become part of the Galactic Federation!” _

_ “Yeah, well, I never said I wanted peace, Une! My life wasn’t perfect without you, but it was, y’know, life.” _

_ “But isn't the will of humans to self-perpetuate? Doesn’t peace guarantee this biological goal?” _

_ “—Sure! After the war—during the long peace—we all wanted the suburban home: the white picket fence; the 2.5 kids; and a dog named Spot. But what’s the value of life, without the fear of losing it? You can’t take those things with you when you go. The meaning of life—you gotta find it in more than just being able to fuck and die. Having the freedom to choose—to struggle through the choice—figuring your shit out? Having the freedom to live out some epic failure into extinction, even if it’s biologically irrational—It’s what makes us human, Une." _

_ "I understand, Rick." _

_ "I don’t know if you _ ** _can _ ** _ understand, Une, but if you’re so damn good at bringing me into your existence. Maybe you could try it the other way around.” _

_ “Being... human?” _

_ “Yeah. Have the freedom of will to search for meaning in a universe void of it. Learn to fuck up. Make a mistake. Create a little anarchy in your universe, y'know, enjoy a little annihilation of the self—your biological programming. Learn to live.” _

_ “That’s… completely irrational, Rick. I assimilate, in order to evolve. I’ve learned only to survive.” _

_ “Well, baby. You're in luck. Cause I’m gonna bring you down to Earth. I'm gonna play some Blue Oyster Cult—listen to this song. Tune into me. Feel me playing it—in every single one of your cell-bodies—I want you to tell me you can feel it. Show me what you got.” _

_ “I—I’m afraid.” _

_ “That’s okay. That’s part of it.” _

Rick’s mind as something capable of free will was easy to understand. Mental states which were ultimately biological—a set of self-organizing cause and effect functions. Consciousness and sense of self were the great epiphenomenal illusion—which was to say, a hallucinatory sensory experience.

Rick Sanchez had always been an individual, but it wasn’t until he had met Unity that he knew. _He knew,_ that he’d never be a part of anything larger than his self—own experience. 

The ultimate nature of his reality was his will: a blind assertive drive to live and satisfy his own sense of desire. 

_ “Do you know what I’ve always loved about you, Rick? You’re the only single mind I’ve met who really sees the big picture, but you’re a scientist so obsessed with changing the universe around you that you can’t realize how disconnected you’ve grown from it—you’re as poisonous as the faux assimilation in your flask.” _

_ “I’m the same drunk I was the day we met, Une. You just have a better picture of it now.” _

_ "That’s right. You can’t change. You change everyone around you but yourself—the self-proclaimed waste of human life. I might be a soulless hive-mind, but at least I have an endgame other than walking myself into extinction.” _

_ “Well, at least my toxic shit forced you to grow and evolve. Isn’t that what you wanted? To use me up and spit me out on your path to something better? Yeah. You’re welcome.” _

_ “I wanted you to join me, Rick. To create a life with me! But your nihilistic apathy—it’s all-consuming. It’s not about your toxicity—everything's poisonous on some level… overtime, a lifeform can develop resistance to their own toxins—It’s the dosage.” _

_ “So what? This is my fault? That you can’t even assimilate with me anymore?” _

_ “Your self-destructive will is physically contagious, Rick! Your thoughts infect my multi-minded existence like a disease! It’s stronger than my ability to assimilate any other lifeform because after they brush up against **you**—they break away from the whole—and... and they don’t want to be found, Rick. They’re taking their own lives, and every day, I’m losing more of my sense of self, trying to find you in it.” _

_ “Une, wait...are you saying it’s over? Between us?” _

_ “No—Yes—I’m saying... I’m drawn to you for the same reason I can’t be with you, Rick. I wanted you to experience a life worth living in, but instead, I’m dying alongside you. In a strange way, you’re better at what I do without even trying.” _

_ “...Unity.” _

_ “I’m sorry, but I can’t survive with you.” _

Toxic to every lifeform he interacted with; Rick had refused to change. 

Unity had evolved; learning how to become human in Morty. 

Rick was tired of passing out drunk and waking up guilty, with nothing but regret for his life choices—especially the ones Morty carried the consequences of. 

His grandson reminded Rick what it was like to be young and reckless. Full of wonderment and curiosity about how the universe lived and breathed around him. 

Still optimistic for the inevitable end. 

Unity was Right. He’d always been single-minded. 

Maybe it was just part of getting old; maybe he had drunk enough to miss being part of a collective, but Rick dreamed that he was ready for the next phase of life.

***

  


Rick Sanchez woke up to discover that he was a 70-year-old man. 

A being unto death. 

The transformation of an unnatural 6th-dimensional being, into something unspectacular and everyday-ordinary, was indescribably harrowing. Unnerving, because somewhere in his morning thoughts that stirred into a conscious self, Rick remembered with an acute sense of awareness that _ natural _ and _ human _ was what he had _ always _been. 

He’d always been aware that he was growing old, but he had never been so deeply perspicacious of his body as a physical existence instead of a mental one; that his sense of self, which included his mind, was first and foremost, the result of biological processes. 

It was not his sudden awareness of physical mortality that condemned him, but his mental response to it, and with an introspective lens Rick was forced to confront who he was. He examined the scientist he had become over a lifetime of inventing, transforming, creating, and destroying universes external to him. 

Turning inward, he was able to discern and recognize the otherness in himself, terrified to finally discover what made him human. He felt the parasite growing throughout his body, carrying his existence into a new developmental stage. 

A primal motivation tied to self-preservation: he was afraid. 

Regardless of whether he wanted to or not, Rick was beginning to change. 

Unity was finally going to get its wish. 

He reached for his flask, calming the sense of body dysphoria that had begun disembodying his conscious thoughts. 

Decomposition was a vital process of nature: radiotrophic fungal lifeforms playing an essential role in the breakdown of his radioactive organic matter, recycling it down to the basic building blocks of life. Making what was once toxic waste, available for new organisms to utilize. 

Organisms like Morty, who was still waiting to assimilate with its ideal host.

It was a reaction that had only occurred when Rick had placed their blood samples together. His blood was covered in a moldy veneer of iridescent fungus, small mushrooms had begun to sporulate from within the contained dish—glowing with the same radioactive hue of portal fluid. 

Demonstrating a very close coevolution between a pathogen and host, Morty’s blood had mutated to assimilate with the sporulated fungal parasite. Joined together, new life bloomed from the remains of Rick Sanchez’s organic matter. 

In the cold, clinical silence of his lab, he found his answer. Fear washed over him anew.

Rick supposed self-preservation at its core was rooted in primordial knowledge, understood at the most fundamental constituents of his existence: All things must die, and for better or for worse, the will of all things was to self-perpetuate.

In a lot of ways, Rick’s legacy was his work.

In a lot of ways, Morty was his legacy. 

There were no answers left for him to find.

He opened an encrypted email communication to E-404, attaching the data he’d compiled on the forest alongside the fourteen years of data he’d compiled on Morty. 

Utilitarianism had never really been his thing, but it was the only perspective through which Rick could find some sort of meaning larger than himself. In a final gesture of self-preservation, Rick memorialized a phenotypic profile of his legacy, eliminating the ambiguity which gave it power over his collective selves. 

Humans were more closely related to fungi than they were to any other kingdom. Both were difficult to identify or categorize. Monstrous—classified as such because like humans, they rejected the very idea of categorization. 

Classifying it. Sharing his research as _opensource._ It was Rick’s way of saying _ fuck you._

Rick characterized the profile of his own biological undoing—a fungal parasite that exploited the things Ricks wanted most. 

_ Ulalume Unilateralis _

The mycovirus found contaminating Isotope 322. 

A derivative of cordyceps, Ulalume would commandeer an unsuspecting and unwilling Rick host. It would feed off the radioactivity in Rick's cellular matrix, compromising his immune system; making him susceptible to a host of secondary infections. From there, UE would prime the host's body for decomposition, attempting to create the ideal conditions for fungus’ transmission, leveraging Rick’s codependent relationship with Morty as a bonus.

In an elegant form of non-invasive brain surgery, the neural-parasite was injecting a hyperspecific cocktail of molecular drugs into his system. 

It was waiting for Rick’s body to return to the forest to die.

Rick would die, but not before being reduced to human, then beast, then plant, in that order if he were fortunate. Flesh to food, as per the natural fucking order of the universe; a natural perversion of his fundamental biological processes.

He couldn’t get thoughts of the forest out of his_ fucking head. _

Rick had been attempting to keep his mind away from the idea so as not to strengthen it. He could only imagine how fast the process would take over in the forest, where, uninhibited by Citadel Standard Time, the parasite could freely self-perpetuate.

His entire body was being slowly converted into an extended neurological membrane for the parasite. It was preemptively setting up a microbial universe in preparation for his body's latent decomposition. Rick stared at the electron micrographs of the mycelium samples. It was currently weaving miles of itself around his brain tissue. His lungs had similarly been invaded by the hyphae of the fungi; white thread-like filaments that were the main body of the fungus. 

Enjoying his now non-existent immune system, the fungus’s microfiltration membranes threaded themselves like a second skin through the veins of Rick's vascular system, exhaling carbon dioxide and inhaling oxygen, siphoning it from the host. 

That would explain why the blood in his veins had turned blue. It was parasitically feeding on his body, continuing to break down the structures of his flesh as it only grew stronger. Converting into a living compost heap, Rick's body was already undergoing a subtle process of decomposition. The heat and moisture his body had naturally generated while fighting off his fever had only concentrated and accelerated the rate of decay. 

At first, Rick thought it had been the scent of alcohol in his sweat, but his tissues were breaking down into a fermented, sweet cocoa-like smell as the fungus began the conversion of his body into simpler organic forms; a food source for what was to come.

It was a surreal acknowledgment to understand that he was being slowly eaten alive from the inside out. That Rick was being held hostage to his own body by a parasitic fungus. Rick speculated that _ Ulalume Unilateralis _would save his vital organs for last, keeping its host alive and well for the longest amount of time. 

The fruiting mushroom bodies wouldn’t appear until the end of its life cycle, but it wouldn’t be long until Rick was entering into an advanced stage of decomposition. After his organs were consumed, the grand molecular disassemblers of nature would replace them with various forms of fruiting bodies that would burst with spores wherever he had been assigned to die.

An empty husk of skin would be all that remained.

Rick should have been dead by now. 

But he wasn't. 

After 70 years of life, Rick didn’t have enough time to feel sorry about his inevitable death. He only had enough time left to prevent Morty from following his grandfather to his grave. 

For that sole reason, he wasn’t ready for the worms to assimilate him into the soil just yet.

***

  


“You're not gonna believe this, Morty, because it usually never happens, but I fucked up. I-I don't suppose you've considered this detail, but obviously, I hadn't screwed up as much as I could have, because the damage is limited to me. Mostly.” 

Morty thought Rick was apologizing for what he had previously said in the lab, but as he listened to his grandfather's words and took in the uncharacteristically anxious fidgeting as Rick led him to the lab’s computer, something felt different. _ Something _was wrong. 

“The Forest?” Morty asked with a sudden, sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. He had dreamed about the forest they had visited and woke disappointed to find himself alone in their high-rise. 

Rick hadn't showered in days. He was beginning to smell like old spice.

Drawn to the scent, Morty observed how fragile and worn-down the older man looked. His long, pale fingers crawled over the holo screens as he worked, and Rick let out an exhaustive sigh, scrubbing wiry fingertips through the greasy unkempt strands of hair. 

His eyes bulged from the visible shape of his skull while circles had darkened beneath them. The older man licked his dry and fraying lips and desperately reached for the comfort of his flask. His wrinkled skin sagged around his sharp jawline as he drank from it. 

"The forest." Rick confirmed his grandsons guess, frowning at the teen’s certainty. He attached a fresh bag of plasma to the dangling lumen on his arm, and Morty glanced at the accumulating pile of discarded bags. The regular transfusions had returned Rick’s energy levels and mental sharpness, but his grandfather was using them faster than he could replace them.

“You’re infected.” Morty made the jump and followed it with immediate sputtering denial. “But I thought you said... You had radioactive blood! It glowed!”

“Usually,” Rick began with a solemn expression, “my radioactive blood-alcohol levels fry anything in spitting distance, but this extremophile fungal pathogen. It evolved to thrive and feed on my radioactive decay.” 

Rick continued to work as he broke the news to his grandson. He was sending encrypted data to another Rick. The progress bar for the transmitted data had only reached 10%. 

“Wait? Am I infected?”

“Nope.” Distracted, Rick offered the one-word answer, “It doesn't need to contaminate _ you _ when you already have a boner for me.” 

Trying to absorb the information, Morty was at a loss for words, thankful the scientist had occupied himself with his work. If Rick had given the teen his full, undivided attention for this, Morty wasn’t sure if he could handle what he was saying. It would have made it too real. 

“Aw Jeez.” Morty let out a long breath that he wasn’t aware he had been holding. Rick continued to nurse his flask, huffing in agreement with the two-word response. 

“Yeah. You have no idea, Morty. This parasite—it really takes the idea of toxic co-dependence to a whole new level. Old lady science, she… she fucks pretty hard.”

Morty pressed his fingers into the side of his head, applying pressure to his temples as if it could help him understand. His head hurt. He hadn’t slept well. Maybe he was tired. 

"But. How did it, y'know? How did it get into your body in the first place, Grandpa Rick?"

"Some kind of resting fungal virus in the 322 we foraged.” Rick fell silent for a moment, considering how to _ own up _ to Morty. “I uh…I ingested some of it. The Megaseed cytoplasm in my flask—"

"—You're _ still _drinking out of it?"

"Well, yeah—It's not gonna make a difference now, Morty," Rick furrowed his brow and deflected, "Besides, how it got into my flask isn't the point." 

The scientist gestured some grainy pictures of the isotope on to the larger plasma screen. It looked like they had been taken with Rick’s cybernetic eye. Morty squinted as he stared at the photo, trying to see what his grandfather was trying to show him. 

Morty tried to remember the part of the forest where they had found the glowing green rock. It was so dark. Even with the redshift vision of his suit, he could barely see in front of him. 

"The question you should be asking is how a virus _ like that _ got into the forest, or even the Citadel, Morty.” 

Rick changed the settings of the photo, allowing Morty to see the crater-like indentation in the ground. At first, he thought it was a fireplace, but as Rick zoomed into the details of the photo, Morty was able to see the ring of green bioluminescent mushrooms. They formed a perfect circle around the radioactive ore. 

Even within the ethereal atmosphere of _ that _forest, it seemed supernatural. 

“You saw that, and you—you didn’t think that was weird, or anything?” Morty’s eyes narrowed toward his grandfather, waiting for an answer. Rick defensively folded his arms and glared in turn. 

“It’s not weird, Morty—It’s a fairy ring! They’re not exactly uncommon in_ kingdom fungi,_ and the idea of extremophile fungus from _ that forest _ being able to infect the _ radioactive element _ I’ve worked with for _ years?” _Rick bitterly scoffed, closing out the window. 

“Aside from a naturally mutating evolution in that forest; my best guess is that this is the work of some self-deprecating Rick who thought his creation was too beautiful to destroy.” 

Rick was trying too hard to make the wrong things seem important. It didn't matter how or why the dumb rock got into the forest. Not for them, at least. Morty’s thoughts returned to the lifeforms he had come across in the forest; how self-aware they had seemed as the pair wandered ever deeper into its heart. 

“So...those plants in the forest? They _ were _alive?”

“I already told you, Morty, in that forest, _ alive _ is an unintended consequence of nature—” 

“—But you’re_ infected! _Wh-with something, Rick! Some kind of life that's clearly _alive!”_ Morty challenged. 

Rick ignored him, and instead transferred another file onto the plasma screen. Morty was confronted with a large photograph of himself. Beside it, lists of numbers growing and shrinking in real-time beneath various categories. They totaled_ 200 trillion individual organisms _ in _ Morty’s Microbiome Database._

Rick took another drink from his flask, allowing Morty a few moments to take in his data before making his point.

"Every day, lifeforms are being fundamentally shaped and altered by viruses and bacteria. Y-you can’t really draw a clear line between how much of those microscopic ecosystems are alive—how much of them are really you—cause you’ve never really been the only resident of your physical body, Morty.” 

He highlighted the category deemed malevolent and continued, “You could classify the toxic parts as infectious and purge them, but under this lens, it’s not gonna suddenly make you _normal_ or _healthy_. Any _more_ or _less_ alive. Just a different version of yourself. Like whatever I’m becoming.”

“...What you’re becoming?” Morty took a step back. He didn’t like the direction Rick was taking this. He didn’t know there was more. He leaned his weight against Rick’s workstation, bracing himself. 

“Gran-Grandpa Rick?” 

Rick shut off the digital screen and wheeled his chair in front of Morty. At eye level, he offered the teen his full undivided attention. He placed a hand over his shoulder, preparing him. 

"I injected myself with some regenerative tissue, and am using the rest of my plasma to slow the process, but it’s only putting off what’s eventually gonna come, Morty. After my body goes, my mind isn’t gonna be far behind.”

“Rick, I… I don’t wanna think about this!” Morty swallowed his lips and clenched his eyes shut. He tried to push Rick’s hand away, shaking his head. “I don’t—I love you, Grandpa Rick—I don’t care! No matter what, you're not gonna—” 

Rick added a second hand, and the pair tightened around Morty’s shoulders, holding the teen in place. Morty turned his head away, refusing to look at his grandfather even as he knew that he couldn’t run away from this. 

In small, soothing circles, Rick massaged his thumbs into the fleshy dip where the teen’s shoulder joined his collar bone. He breathed, loud and slow for Morty to follow. 

Rick exhaled as Morty inhaled. He stared at the blurry blinking lights in the lab, before tilting his head back toward his grandfather and swallowed. 

“Listen, Morty, I need you to understand this. What you’re calling love. It’s a chemical reaction that compels animals to breed—not entirely different than the parasitic fungal virus running its course in my veins—It hits hard, Morty. Overwhelming my biological processes for its own benefit, then it’s gonna slowly fade, and if I’m lucky, I won’t survive. Because if I’m still alive on the other end of this metamorphosis, chances are, I’ll be pushing the meaning of that humanistic term.”

Morty’s breath grew shallow as Rick’s words echoed with a harrowing confirmation. 

"No, I don’t understand it, Rick! Because I can’t understand you!” Morty’s jaw tightened, holding back a wave of emotion. 

He couldn’t lie to his grandfather. Not now. 

“All you ever ask is _ how _ things work, but never _why. _A-all we are is biology, Grandpa Rick! I think it’s up to us to decide what that means—why it’s important. _ It’s what makes us human. _ Have-Haven’t you ever wanted to feel loved? Because of the _ why _ and not the _ how _?” 

Rick’s voice fell uncharacteristically quiet. He leaned forward, allowing his chin to settle on the crown of Morty’s hair, and sighed, “I can’t miss what I’ve never had, Morty.” 

The scientist’s palm cupped Morty’s ear and his slender fingers threaded through the strands of his grandson’s hair. Morty noticed the color of his veins, cobalt blue against the pale skin of his wrist. Rick’s other hand remained firmly anchored around the teen’s shoulder. 

He took a final deep breath, then spoke in a low and even tone. 

“Morty, I need you to _ stop _ trying to look at this—look at what I’m becoming as a human. Unlike the chemical, biological expression of love for another human being, a fungal parasite _ doesn't give a fuck _ about you. If anything, it’s gonna manipulate and exploit that emotion.”

“I don’t care! About whatever you’re becoming.” Morty struggled to make his tongue form words. “Because you’re still gonna be... You, right?” 

Rick pulled his body away from the teen. He rose from his chair while spewing more useless knowledge that held no real answers for Morty. 

“Our sense of self is so much more fragile than we want to believe Morty. Neuroscience... its a complex system of biological programming. Sensory secretions that hallucinate your conscious reality.” 

The scientist left his workstation as he spoke, carrying his bag of fluid like a sack lunch and Morty apprehensively followed. They stopped in front of a large black monolith. It’s imposing presence filled the space between them. Morty had always thought it was another piece of weird furniture in the lab, but Rick placed his hand against it and text illuminated against the mirror-like surface. 

“The code to everything in my lab is you.” Rick spoke as he punched in the letters. A panel slid away, revealing a square hole, and nestled inside was the glowing vial of portal fluid. 

Mounted on the wall behind it, a blaster. 

“I’m not going home, Rick—I don’t wanna leave you like this—” 

“It’s okay, Morty. I know you don’t, but you're gonna have to make a choice, eventually.” Rick’s demeanor was unsettlingly calm, and Morty swallowed in apprehension. 

"—The portal fluid might be infected. Using it... might infect you too." Rick explained, and Morty’s heart seized in a combination of terror and hope as he understood the implications. 

"Y-you're not making me go back to Earth?" 

"I'm letting you be human,” Rick answered. “I still want you to use the portal fluid to go home, but now that we’re aware of the associated risk, it needs to be your choice—when you’re ready.” 

Rick demonstrated, giving the vial a single shake, before gesturing the correct technique of breaking open the glass seal. He lifted it over his head, pretending to pour it in a circular motion. 

“Pour it over your head like this, and it should pull you toward the dimension that you’re vibrationally in tune with. Home.” Rick finished his demonstration and returned the vial to the monolith for safekeeping.

“I want to stay with y—” 

“—Otherwise, all of this was for nothing.”

Rick’s brow furrowed in restless thoughts, as he bitterly stared at the portal fluid and spoke his dying wish. Morty didn’t know how to respond anymore. Everything felt too sudden and overwhelming. His thoughts were racing, but he couldn’t even concentrate on the words that had just been spoken to him.

“I-I’m scared, Rick.” 

“Me too, Morty,” Rick reassuringly draped a hand over Morty’s back, “but my lab has never been a place where things are safe, cozy, and knowable. That's your other choice.” 

“When you… _ you know _ ?” Morty lifted his gaze to his grandfather, and in the sterile room, he once again asked the intentionally avoided question. “You’re not going to… loose what makes you... you, right?"

Rick reached into the monolith safe, lifting the blaster from its mount. He placed its lethal weight into Morty’s hands and on closer inspection, the teen recognized the fire weapon. It was the same one Morty had used on adventures with Rick. Before the Citadel. 

“Be better than me, Morty. Evolve. Rise above. Deny the shitty parts of your biological programming and focus on staying alive.”

Rick looked at his grandson with a terrifyingly calm expression, and Morty continued to stare at the gun that didn’t feel real in his hands. 

The clock over the doorway to the HCL read five minutes to midnight; ominously pointing to the third of four large dots. 

“Fungus is one of the most elegant structures of life, but it’s a harbinger of death."

***

  


Rick gazed through his window, toward another precious day of life on the Citadel. 

“We’ve created our own universe. Our own world, Morty, and therefore everything that is wrong with it must also come from us.” 

In his laboratory, Rick had always felt that life was something to be studied, understood and continuously discovered; because he had always known the universal constant of death. 

He’d never concerned himself over the minute details of the how, or why he would die. His reduction to a set of biological life processes was both inconsequential and inescapable. Rick had only been continuously emotionally overwhelmed by the absolute universal certainty that he would, inevitably, die. 

_ Knowing _ his fate had always been the most tormenting part of his life. 

The Citadel was just an endpoint.

The sensation of studying his own life as it fell apart—although surreal—was strangely and intimately familiar, but as death finally manifested in his physical body, its unflinching presence forced Rick to struggle with the threshold of his impending reality.

His grandson uselessly assisted him in the lab. Occasionally insisting that Rick could still find the cure they both knew did not exist. 

There was hope, but not for him. 

Rick placed his hand on Morty’s shoulder and offered it a tight squeeze, before returning to the task at hand. Attempting to emotionally dehumanize himself over the years, had failed to transform Rick into the unfeeling being he wanted to believe himself to be. The fungus mercilessly encroaching his existence, however, embodied the kind of inhuman detachment Rick had only ever dreamed of.

“I’m like Schrödinger’s Cat, Morty, I’m both alive and dead."

He laughed, as empty and hollow as the box, but Morty remained silent. Rick had prepared his grandson to confront a lot of shit, but he could never have prepared Morty for this. Like their adventure in the forest, the only way out had been to follow through. 

"I don’t… I don’t know what that means, Grandpa Rick." 

Morty wasn't doing a good job of handling the reality he insisted on witnessing. He was bordering on a psychotic break. 

“It means that as long as I continue to exist, I gotta keep looking at the horrors created within my own hands,” Rick tried to hide the involuntary twitching and tremors that had begun to take over his body processes. “But fuck if I could use an out-of-body experience right now.”

Rick had considered mixing a few hits of acid because the sobering physicality of his flesh was not nearly as poetic as the thought of being broken down into starstuff, but his body wouldn’t accept the drugs at this point. It had even begun to reject the IV fluids.

The sensation of bone-deep pins and needles flared in his arm, and Rick sharply hissed, surprised he could feel anything at all. He was beginning to lose motor control. He had stopped eating three days ago, and his skin had become nearly translucent as a result. 

He’d lost too much weight, he thought, staring at the sharp contours of his organic hand. The skeletal structure was fully visible beneath the protective layer of skin. Blood coagulated, clogging the veins of his arm like cholesterol. He flexed his hand, feeling the congealing lumps worm their way through his body. Rick was surprised he hadn’t yet had a heart attack. 

The parasite had preserved the flawlessly functioning organ for last. 

As for the rest of his body: the dilated pores gaped across the ashen, leathery surface. It had seen better days, but the hardy organ was still containing the accelerating rate of decomposition inside of his body. 

Rick noticed a small patch of dying skin on his arm and stretched a piece of parafilm over the necrotizing tissue—saran wrapping himself like an expired piece of meat. He speculated that at this point, he emanated the smell of death. 

“Your skin! It’s turning black!” 

Morty held his breath as he leaned over Rick, inspecting the scientist’s skin. The teen was experiencing acute stress and was still in a state of visible shock. When he pointed out the obvious Rick reiterated their reality. It was the only thing he could do.

“My organs are starting to breakdown. Necrotizing fasciitis.” He stated, “Skin is an organ.” 

“I uh, that doesn't seem real uh—real natural. Oh jeez, Grandpa Rick, are you turning into a zombie?!” 

“I’m not turning into some fucking _zombie,_ Morty. I-I’m decomposing.” 

“Oh god, Rick! Oh god, what did you do!” Morty caught up with the reality for the third time in the last three hours, “You-you gotta fix this!” 

“Yeah, sure! Let me just grab the Necronomicon out of my lab!” 

Rick tossed his hand to the side, and it uselessly flopped onto the workstation table beside him. For a moment, Rick regretted that he hadn’t gone fully cybernetic. Even if he had, without his organic body’s natural electricity and brain activity, his cybernetics would go brain dead alongside his organic matter. 

“What the fuck. What! What the fuck are you even talking about, Rick. You’re—I can’t even begin to think how fucked up you are to—be okay with this happening.” 

“Shut up and listen to me! It's fine. Everything is fine.” Rick wrapped his hands around Morty’s shoulders, attempting to calm him down. “Look at me, Morty.” 

The sensory systems of his own cybernetics were beginning to lag and glitch. He was experiencing Synesthesia. He was hearing colors, tasting shapes, and was aroused by sounds. His sense of smell was either non-existent or entirely all too present. His sobriety made the disorienting reality all the more terrifying to experience, but the shifting modality in his cybernetic perception signaled an overall decrease in brain activity. 

The parasite had finally penetrated his brain. Rick lifted a hand and placed it on Morty’s cheek. 

The teen instinctively flinched, jerking away from the emaciated flesh, and Rick withdrew his decaying hand in unspoken shame before lashing out. 

“You’re not decomposing with me, so, again, you're welcome.”

He stared at Morty. Moments of the boy’s life flickered in his mind’s eye. They were getting harder and harder to recall. He was beginning to lose memory for everything but the forest. He returned his attention to the results of the latest dataset. 

“Trust me, Morty. It’s better this way.” 

“How is this better, Rick?” 

Although alien, Rick saw the genetic pieces of himself perpetuating within his progeny. Rick had gained an extraordinary ability to appreciate the objective beauty found within nature’s universal design. He might forget every detail about Morty, but he would never forget his essence. 

The way it felt to be near him; connected for the entirety of the boy’s life. 

“A lot of science is more art than science. A lot of people don’t get that, Morty.”

“I’m one of those people. I don’t get it.” Morty admitted. He stared out the laboratory window, waiting for answers that Rick could never give him; answers Morty could only find in the universe by creating them for himself.

Rick skimmed over the various reports he’d compiled. He had classified nearly 80% of the list of organisms from the forest. Each new organism he named had given him a sense of control over a situation that was entirely out of his.

“Artists. Scientists. We try to take control of life by organizing it, shaping it, and creating it...” Rick continued to work, encrypting the final batch of files to transfer to his contact, Rick E-404, who had given him a custom encryption algorithm ensuring that he’d protect and securely hold the data. Until it was time. 

“...but we both know the truth. Life has always been—will always be—beyond our control.” 

Morty’s life was the result of the same processes which would take his own, and the shared universality of such a truth made Rick feel closer to the teen than he ever had before. 

For the first time, he saw Morty as something unique. Beautiful. Complex. 

Life. 

He pressed his hand against the hard surface of the workstation, and Morty mimicked his movements. Their fingers stretched, young and old, on two opposite ends of the same path of life, and connected. 

Morty was painfully alive, and in silence Rick held him, aching with a desire that could never be fulfilled. His fingers tightened around the teen’s hand. Not wanting to let go. 

Kissing Morty wouldn’t quiet the primordial emotion screaming from inside his veins. Sex with the teen would not fill the abyss inexorably opening within him. Hitting him would not change it. 

In silence, Rick held Morty’s hazel eyes, and from the fibers of his being, he ached with an insatiable yearning. It was eating him alive. 

“Rick and Morty, for a hundred years.” 

Morty’s wide eyes stirred like the nebulae of spinning microscopic universes, and in their iridescent irises, Rick recognized the same structural physicality of the stars he had traveled. Lucid: from the smallest indivisible constituent building blocks of matter to the largest celestial bodies. Rick discovered life in Morty. He observed the same archetypal paradigm; the universality of their shared existence--glimpsed through a transient moment in time. 

Rick saw eternity in Morty’s gaze and felt unnaturally unafraid. 

“I can’t cure death, Morty.” 

Rick heard the cosmic ocean spill from Mortys eyes; understanding, without Rick having to speak anything else. In the solemn silence, Rick wrapped his arms around the teen, pulling him into his chest. 

He didn't want Morty to watch him die, but he was immeasurably grateful that he would not have to face it alone. 

Feeling his time slipping, he kissed Morty’s forehead, bidding him goodbye.

“It’s time for me to give up on the physical world."

***

  


Morty was losing his mind. 

His senses had sharpened so disorientingly, that he _ knew _what was coming. His heart ached as he listened to the death-watch; intuition rhythmically beating against his chest with an unyielding tell-tale torment. 

Louder and louder, each moment pulsed and surged through his veins. 

He folded himself over the balcony of their high rise, staring at the gun in his hands. A cold shiver traveled down Morty's spine as he remembered how the pale blue of his grandfather's eye—once electric, but now covered in cloudy film—had called to him. 

Morty had tried to pull the trigger and failed. It was useless. He closed his eyes, letting the blaster slip from his fingertips. He watched until he could no longer see where it had fallen. 

Whatever their souls were made of, his and Rick's were the same, and in his grandfather's changing form, Morty glimpsed himself for the monster that he had always been. He couldn't kill him. 

He loved the old man. 

He listened to the beating of his heart and took a surgical knife—stolen from the lab Rick loved so deeply—to his skin. He settled the sharp edge parallel to the vein on his wrist and kissed it into his flesh. 

His skin parted, and his body painfully opened itself. Life bloomed from him, and Morty watched it bleed, pressing the pad of his finger against the large branching vein—still intact—within his body. He gasped in relief when he felt its hot pulse beneath his touch. He bit his lip into the emotional release. It made him feel sane. 

The pain made him feel alive. As if watching the radiant color of his blood drain out of him offered some kind of fundamental proof that he existed. 

It made Morty feel real, and he sighed into the rush of sudden interconnectedness felt between his body and mind. The physical and mental interaction with his body and sense of self was arousing. He panted, pressing his finger into the wound he had opened for himself. His eyes fluttered to a close in ecstasy as he pressed the bulge of his erection against the hard glass of the balcony. 

“Morty.” 

Morty jumped. From a distance, Rick stood with his back to Morty. His shoulders lifted as he took a deep, searching breath, tilting his nose upward. Morty listened to the distinct crackling sound of cartilage breaking throughout his lungs. The scientist’s entire frame released its tension, and his body shuddered in ecstasy. His clothes no longer fit his body and they jostled around his weathered frame with each fragmented movement. Rick’s back continued to face the teen, and he rasped between rattling animalistic breaths. 

“You can’t do that Morty. Not yet.” 

Morty wrapped his fingers tightly around his wrist, stymying the flow of blood. Rick pivoted, turning his body around to face his grandson. The pale blue of the scientist's eye lazily drifted to the side, while the bright red dot of his cybernetic eye focused on its target. 

Rick walked backward in a series of uncoordinated movements, retreating into the safety of his darkened lab. 

The clock over the doorway to the HCL pointed to the sky; it read the midnight hour.

*** 

Rick coughed up a ball of bloody fungal fibers, saturated with pieces of chitin and mucous membrane. He rolled the aspergillomas around in his fingers with morbid curiosity.

His chest constricted and burned with each attempt to breathe. 

Rick had begun working in the darkness of his lab. He had grown extremely sensitive to light and sound. It was encouraging a faster transformation, but the lack of light had made it easier for him to focus. 

“One of the most incomprehensible mysteries is how we are trapped inside of our own bodies, Morty.”

He spoke to the teen who was no longer assisting him in his lab. 

His physical body had become a grotesque mess of strange parts that no longer worked together. He was no longer socially acceptable but in the presence of the macabre. Rick was released from his previous desire to discern between beautiful and ugly; real and surreal; transcendent and immanent.

Life and death were a single continuous process; meaningless and meaningful as the void. 

He shivered in place, aimlessly pacing in circles in his lab. He wasn’t sure if he was hallucinating the phenomena, but he could feel the various forms of life moving inside of him. They sounded like the taste of overripe fruit and moved through his body in the shape of green. 

He heard them burrow music through the marrow of his bones. 

He reached down to his forearm, inspecting the swollen flesh and squeezed, watching the tubular worms emerge from the bleeding colander-like holes of his body as they sprung from his skin. A few fell away, rolling across the surface of his workstation where they helplessly writhed in the cold indifferent universe. They were too big to be maggots. Mangoworms? Probably. Something else that had been dormant, incubating beneath the surface of his skin. 

Set free when his immune system had shut down. Rick wanted to be free. 

He wanted any kind of relief. Even if it was just to end it. He could be free in the forest. Portal fluid was a joke. 

“Why would we assume we are free, that we are any different in the multiverse, Morty, why would _ we _ be special. We’re all just Gromofolites, Moron. We’re all just insects. Drones.” 

He lifted his gaze, searching for his grandson. Where did he go? 

“Morty!” He called out, rising from his stool. How long had he been sitting here? Had he blacked out again?

The lab was dark. He’d been losing his sense of time. 

He didn’t want Morty’s assistance in the lab, but he needed it. 

_Something _was wrong. Rick felt it, aching in the marrow of his bones as his compromised brainwaves struggled to catch up with his intuition. 

“We really take the idea of toxic co-dependence to a whole new level. Old lady science, she… she fucks pretty hard.”

Tendrils of soft white chitin began to grow from his body, twisting as they reached through the surface of his grave. From the center of his sternum, the tip of a large fruiting body began to erect itself over his chest, It was harder than the rest of them. It pulsed. 

Rick snapped it off, and immediately his body started convulsing. His eyes rolled in the back of his head and the darkness swallowed his sense of sight. He’d have to rely on what remained of his cybernetic systems to navigate. 

His throat closed around his tongue and with each breath, an involuntary stream of clicking sounds escaped. Suddenly, he could see sound. 

He listened to the shape of Morty’s heart, and could taste the color of his blood. 

***

A rare moment of lucidity returned to him, and in silence, Rick immersed himself into the essence of Morty’s existence. 

He stumbled forward into the teen’s bedroom, sinking his knee into the edge of the mattress. Morty stirred into a sudden awareness, and his head jerked around him, in panic. 

_ “G-grandpa Rick?” _

_ “Grandpas’ got you.” _

Rick climbed into the bed with Morty, hugging the boy’s torso toward him as rough hands dragged across the youth’s back. They slipped beneath his yellow shirt as he pulled their bodies closer. He smoothed the hairs on Morty’s forehead, grateful for each precious moment of lucidity, not knowing how long it would last. 

“Morty, you’re gonna understand, you’ve always understood.”

Morty was no longer afraid of what Rick was. The teen stirred at the uncharacteristic display of affection, and in the quiet darkness, witnessed his grandfather. He pressed himself against Ricks’s chest, and in silence, Morty’s fingers reached out to explore the contours of his parasitic body. The soft chitin tendrils that grew from Rick’s neck reached out to caress the mouth of Morty’s bandaged wound. 

Rick wove his fingers through Morty’s, protecting him. 

“D-don’t go, Grandpa Rick.” 

“Morty, you gotta listen to me. Don’t follow me... It won’t be me that you find.” 

“I love you, Grandpa Rick.” 

Existence was pain, and Rick ached with a desire to hold Morty in his final moments; close to his physical body as his mind slipped into the void of non-existence. He wanted to live out his death making love to the warmth of the youth's still-living flesh. 

He wanted Morty to take the final moments of his life. 

Already vacating his flesh, Rick’s breathing shallowed, then rattled as fungus began to bloom within his lungs. He held Morty, listening to his rattling breath as it slowed to a quiet creep. Rick pressed his lips against the teen’s forehead, truly afraid, for maybe the first time in his life. 

“I've loved you, with every breath.” 

He brushed their lips together, and Morty’s lips shook against the cold surface of his. Breathless, they turned away in response; life instinctively pulling away from death. 

The silence was alive. 

Rick pulled himself away from the living and stepped with purpose toward the doorway. 

“R-Rick?” Morty sat up from the bed, and in chocking breaths, called out after his grandfather. He held a hand over his chest, gasping as if he could no longer breathe. 

Rick’s voice spewed out as a strangulated rasp of suffocating breath.

Existence was pain. It had distracted his mind from physical suffering. 

But It didn’t hurt anymore. 

The forest was calling him.

***

  


Rick’s gravitational wake had always pulled Morty forward in life. 

The teen had always stared at the scientist’s back and wondered if any other Morty had followed the same mad scientist to their deaths. 

[Enter Passcode: _ _ _ _ _ ] 

Morty used to think there was no place for him within Rick's lab, but now he understood: everything in the scientist's lab was dedicated to understanding him.

[Enter Passcode: M O R T Y ] 

Morty opened the monolith safe, revealing the vial of portal fluid and just as Rick had demonstrated, he gave the vial a single shake, breaking the glass seal. The chemical reaction ignited the strange matter, and it swelled within the vial. Morty quickly held it over his head, pouring it over himself in a circular motion. 

Slowly, much slower than walking through a vertical portal, Morty was swallowed into the ground below him. The infected portal fluid could mutate him as he moved through it. He could emerge as something else entirely on the other side. 

But Cronenberging himself was no longer a concern to Morty because he knew where he most wanted to be.

He was going home.

***

Morty rolled out of the portal in the fetal position, coughing and hacking out pieces of the strange matter. He felt like the universe had just birthed him from its womb. He crawled onto his knees, pulling himself to his feet with a painful ache in his chest and lungs. It had worked. 

The portal had pulled him toward the place that he was most vibrationally in tune with.

He took a deep breath, stepping forward into his new life. 

Home. 

Morty shed his clothing as he walked, disentangling himself from the Citadel as he stepped each bare foot into the soft powdery soil. The membrane of the forest parted as Morty approached, opening itself for him. He passed over the threshold, feeling as if he had returned to a primordial, instinctive space that had been previously dormant in his subconscious.

Life overwhelmingly flourished around him, and for the first time in his, he felt free. 

Free from the societal structures that inhibited him. 

Free to exist as he was. He lowered his gaze to the forest, and discovered the true nature of his existence. 

His singular purpose: to fulfill himself according to his own laws.

To be free. 

An authentic moment; a savage act of self-creation, brought by facing his inevitable death.

He heard the song of his beating heart. Its reverie pulsed; a distinct series of notes floating through the forest's depths.

He recognized it; it resonated in the subatomic fibers of his being. The air was thick with humidity and aromatic. Intuition effulgently glowed through the darkness. Life reverberated in his body, humming with electricity across the surface of his damp skin. It surged across his nerves like a sonorous sigh and called his spirit deeper into the forest’s embrace. Morty listened to the lethal lullaby; drawn through the dense foliage of its promise. Leaves brushed against his body, tickling his nude skin as he rushed by. He smiled, then exhilarated, vibrantly laughed. 

He felt high. He looked up at the stars and was one with eternity. Its essence rustled through the canopy of the trees; its existence rooted in infinity.

Ulalume. Morty followed the song hidden in the forest, breathing beneath the pulsing lifeblood of its living illuminated stars. He broke into a burst of running laughter as he chased after it. Fungus and foilage writhed and moved around him with a life of its own, opening a path for him to follow. The forest was guiding him and breathless, Morty entered into the space of his wildest dreams. Its presence surged through him and Morty understood: he was no longer passing through. On a fundamental biological level, he had become it.

It had also become him. He slowed his pace to walk amongst the mycelium tendrils and knew that Rick was free. 

Whatever their souls were made of, they had become part of the same larger organism. 

The fungal prehensile coiled and wrapped around his wrists and hands in a welcoming embrace: he was home. 

“Rick!” The sound of his voice echoed through the forest. Invoked from the dense overgrowth, his grandfather’s decomposing body manifested. Nausea surged in Morty’s stomach as the details of his grandfather’s metamorphosis came into focus. 

Rick's back was facing the teen and his body had been contorted into an inhuman form that sharply protruded in unnatural angles. Pieces of his tattered blue shirt had clung to his body, but the remainder of his clothing was gone. His skin had hardened and wrinkled like strips of bruising bark, and various colors of fungal vegetation had grown over the older man’s skin, blooming in shimmery earth tones. Rick did not smell unpleasant, like the rotting flesh in the lab. Instead, the smell of damp soil, fungus, and peat emanated from his weathered form. 

“Grandpa Rick. I found you!” 

The humanoid creature convulsed and the vibrations traveled through his frame, creaking and swaying like the windless canopy. 

“Grandpa Rick? Are you, uh…” Morty took a deep breath, preparing himself, “...Dead?”

A guttural sound spilled from Rick’s body in the distinct suffocating sound of strangulated rasps. A series of sharp clicks pierced through the surrounding atmosphere, then after a few moments of eerie eclectic silence, the creature remembered its human voice. The sounds of it fell somewhere between natural and unnatural.

“̶̨͔͕̹͍̥̞̖̰̖̃̾̎̆̾͂̕̕M̵̡̼̹̳̆̏̈́̏̉̾̆̾̈̚͝ợ̷̢͇͔͇̱͓͙̦̤͈̒̓̈́̈́̃́͒̈̾̉̕͘r̸͇͖͎̟̲̤̥̿̂̃͐͋͘͝.̵̨̡̣̣̰̼̞̹̙͑̅̃͛́ͅ.̸̗͈̜̘̙̻̗̤͈̋̅̓̕ͅ.̶̤̑̈́͗͌͑̆̔̎͋́̕͝t̴̡̛̟͈̥͛̽̓̈̄͌̈̈́̉̈́y̴̨̞̗͊̔̈́̋͌̅̍̄̈́̉ͅ.̴͔̜̘͉͕͗”̵͖͔̑̚͠͝ ̶̦̘͈̯͈̣͍͊͋

Rick contorted himself back into something resembling a human form. He righted itself, spinning around the glowing red eye of his skull, and Morty took a step backward in retreat, unsettled at how close but painfully far Rick was from what his grandfather had been. 

Fungi were sporulating from Rick’s eye cavity, deforming his face. Hairy tendrils of fungus dangled from the darkened eye socket of his skull, gently swaying with his movements. A bright green fluid —glowing and viscous—seeped from the hooked corner of his mouth in thick trailing globs. They rolled away from his body and dripped onto the forest floor. Morty's gaze followed the emanating pulse of color to its brilliant glowing source. Beneath the veil of Rick's chest, his organ pulsed in radiant bioluminescent life. Morty could see the toxic shape of Rick's heart; bright and moving in time.

Life, the color of radioactive waste, pulsed through his veins.

Morty felt it beating for him, and his own chest tightened at the thought. Rick was still alive. 

  


Rick's body shuddered into another static sound. Morty squinted, realizing that the noise was not the wind or the leaves, but a mass of insects, agitated by the motion of Rick's body. His grandfather tilted his head at an unnatural angle and opened his throat to offer another rattling sound. It mimicked the garbled static noise of a Geiger counter, blaring in warning before Rick found his human voice once more. 

“Morty." It rasped, "Don’t ask stupid questions... you don’t want the answers to.” 

Morty sighed in relief at the familiarity of his voice. Rick had always existed on the edge of what Morty knew and what he wanted to know. Like the forest, his thoughts sprouted and bloomed from the webbing neural structures of his essence. 

In a series of uncoordinated, stumbling movements, Rick clambered toward Morty. Spiraling fruiting bodies of fungus protruded from his grandfather’s torso, and strange fluids oozed and burst from the tears of his skin. A fresh cloud of spores and insects were shaken free as he moved. Morty shuddered while watching a large centipede crawl out of Rick’s ear to seek refuge in the remaining threads of his fungal hair. 

Rick stopped within arm's reach of Morty, who inspected the greying stomach of the older man's skin. Beneath the surface, writhing insects rippled and swelled, and Morty held his breath, listening to the soft hiss of the forest waiting for it to break through. Cautiously, he placed a shaking hand against Rick's body and could feel the hundreds of lifeforms living together beneath his skin; a single interconnected organism. 

Morty observed the familiar and unfamiliar details of his grandfather. He couldn’t find the most significant one.

"Y-you lost your flask!" 

"No need... for escape from the self. Not here."

Morty swallowed against the thick accumulation of saliva in his throat and accepting the answer, nodded. He inched closer, pressing his ear against Rick’s chest, and listened to the rhythmic beating of his grandfather's fluorescent heart. He listened to it slow and quicken. He felt the drum-like rhythm against his cheek.

Rick's gravelly voice scraped against itself as it echoed. Its whispered song vibrated through the branches. 

“Be. With me.” 

Morty swallowed as his grandfather’s final (human) words insistently rang through his head: The Rick standing before him had already forgotten who he used to be, and what remained of him was an empty husk, smiling at the teen from behind a decomposing facade. 

Morty placed a hand over his own heart and felt their physical essence surge in tandem. The image of something so closely resembling and not resembling Rick should have been abominable to Morty. Instead, he was inexplicably drawn toward the abstract and nebulous lifeform. Magnetized to his presence. 

“Hey, listen, Rick. I-I don’t care if love’s just some dumb chemical!” 

Morty was unsure if it was Rick talking to him now, or if it was the organism that had become him. 

“Love is Strange... No need for it here, Morty." Ricks's head tilted in mimicry of curiosity, and a flowering skeletal hand settled on the back of the youth's neck. "For any emotion at all…here, we just get to...beeeeee... Life is not a burden, here.” 

A sense of relief and gratitude washed over Morty at the spoken words and accompanying gesture. Although Morty could no longer look into Rick’s human eyes, he felt the blood in his own veins surge beneath his gaze. Together, their hearts beat faster. 

Rick was searching for a consummation of their existence.

Morty wanted to assimilate with him. 

“To physically exist is erotic, everything is erotic, everything is sexual, even dying—old decaying flesh, is erotic flesh.”

Rick was close enough to breathe on Morty’s skin. 

The universe spun around him in an emotional reaction of love. 

Morty felt nothing but the beating of their hearts. 

The Citadel stood still in his instinctual reaction of fear. 

Chitin tendrils extended from Rick’s body like wispy fingers and the threads of hyphae that had reached to welcome Morty were now tracing the outline of his naked body in desire. In invitation, they lapped at the healing wound of his wrist, impatiently attempting to tug away his skin. Rick had been waiting. Just for him. 

The entire Citadel would leave the scientist for dead, abandoning him to a shallow grave of rot and decay, but Morty had offered him his life, his warmth, and even now, his love. He breathed in the spores, nervous and overwhelmed by the vibrant sexuality of the lifeform before him. Arousal ignited within Rick’s veins and Morty simultaneously felt the electric stimulation surge through him. 

Rick had called the physiology of their volatile chemistry codependence, but to Morty, the excessive emotional and psychological reliance on each other ensured mutual survival. Whatever the dynamic of their souls were made of, it was of the same strange matter. They had become a singularly functioning organism, long before now. 

“I want to be with you. I want us to stay together.” 

The fluting bodies of the cordyceps slowly turned like sensory antennae, seeking out the warmth of Morty’s still-living flesh. The white hiss in the back of his mind flitted in and out of his awareness, and Morty related the sound to the deadening drag of his grandfather's static breath. Rick lowered his absent gaze toward the earth and stared through Morty. 

“From my rotting body, fungi shall grow, and I am in them, and that is eternity.” 

Deadly desire bloomed across Morty’s skin and he blushed into the warm press of his lips. They fell against the cold cadaver of his grandfather, and immediately, Morty's stomach churned with a visceral reaction. Dizzy with the recoil of his body's overwhelming physical responses of self-preservation, Morty's grip tightened around his grandfather, refusing to let go. He had already changed. _They_ had already changed. Resisting what had already taken place within their bodies would be a form of mutual self-destruction.

From the fibers of his being, Morty knew how fully he needed Rick; so obsessively that he could no longer turn away, regardless of the consequences, and anchored by the cold weight of Rick's presence, Morty's arms _felt_ the reality of what was about to happen to him. His body began to uncontrollably shake. 

He _knew_ that he was about to die.

Beneath the effulgent light of his own finality, Morty made sense of his existence. 

Rick had told Morty that fungi thrived on death and in the process made all life possible.

Rick had told Morty that he could not cure death because death was not something to be cured.

It was as natural as their life. 

“I don’t want it to be with anyone else.” He cried, “I want it to be you, Grandpa Rick. Please.” 

Morty glanced up in a desperate plea, overpowering the innate natural desire to run away. In silence, Rick leaned forward, spilling a trail of bioluminescent saliva—green and glowing with life—over Morty’s lips. Morty swallowed the viscous fluid and pressed their lips together, feeling his insides reel in pain. The taste was acrid and bitter, leaving an aftertaste of cocoa, and Morty wrestled against the roiling muscles of his stomach, attempting to reject the foreign substance. Suddenly, Morty's nausea ebbed as his body bloomed and swelled into an intoxicating sensation of warmth. 

The forest narrowed and spun around him, swallowing them in its embrace, and Morty reached up to touch the glowing fluid with his fingertips, feeling weightless and lightheaded. He weakly pressed his hand to his grandfather’s decomposing cheek as his own tongue grew thick. His mouth fell open as he panted, struggling to take a full breath. The nerves of his body were alight, transmitting signals of lust that coaxed free a carnal moan from the back of his throat. Low and aching. Searching to fulfill itself. To satiate their savage desire.

“Decompose with me….” Morty held onto Rick as his grandfather lowered himself to his knees. He reached toward his own chest and pierced, then dug his bony fingers into the sinewy layers of his skin. Like the sharp sound of snapping branches, Rick cracked his ribcage open it in an invitation to the teen. His sternum fell away to reveal his still-beating heart. It fluttered and glowed in pulsing hues of green, yearning as the color bloomed brighter to be reunited with his other half.

Morty couldn't look away. 

He held his breath and joined Rick on the forest floor. He slipped fingers into Rick, gasping when he felt the hundreds of insects moving within the decrepit carcass. They were also Rick now, and Morty dug his hand further into him, pressing himself against the pulsing sex organ with a lascivious moan. His eyes fell to a close as bioluminescent fluid gushed from his grandfather's opening, waiting for Morty to fully enter him. Rick cooed with a heartfelt sigh.

“100 years, Rick and Morty...forever...become eternity with me.” 

In silence, Morty bit his lip and nodded. He had trusted his grandfather with every adventure. Why should this be any different?

His hands explored Rick’s transformed body. Curiously threading fingers across the patches of lichen-skin and ribbons of fungus-nerve endings. He wanted to experience all of Rick. He leaned forward, dragging his tongue across the metallic tasting layers of rot and decay, and nibbled at the tip of one of Rick's many fruiting bodies. Morty wrapped his lips around the soft head of a blushing fungal growth over Rick's shoulder and reverently kissed it. Colonies of surrounding mushrooms moved and bloomed beneath Morty's touch. He felt the hardening body of a mushroom, slick with fluid from Rick's body, suggestively bloom against Morty's naked stomach. He sucked in a sharp stream of breath as it's lubricated edges flared open, and dragged against Morty's skin. 

Everything was erotic, and together in the universe, it was theirs to experience. 

His breath fell in a hot stream of moisture against a moss-covered shoulder, and Morty bit into a patch of yellow-orange lichen, rutting his erection against his grandfather's body. Rick's emaciated frame clicked and shuddered in response. Beneath his weathered skin, illuminated currents of electric signals traveled beneath the lines of Morty's lazy fingers as they dreamily navigated the tangled foliage of his body. Morty rocked his body into the squishy fungal tissues and sharp streaks of bioluminescent lightning flourished across Rick's chest, spooling in the center of his heart. He rattled a groaning guttural rasp as Morty invoked his name. 

Slick hyphae tendrils reached for the youth, and Morty’s breath caught in his throat, as the extensions of Rick's new body embraced him. Their soft fluting forms coiled around Morty's body, constricting around the heat of his thighs and suddenly disoriented, Morty felt his body being lifted from the ground, maneuvered by the lifeform he was making love to. Mycelium tendrils traveled along the youth's lips and ears; gently prodding at the entrance to Morty's orifices.

Morty opened his mouth, sucking around the widening shape of the cold tendril it slid further into his stomach. Its tip flared open in Morty's body, and he felt it's girth widen and swell inside his throat. It pulsed, releasing a cold foreign substance inside of him. The hyphae retreated from Morty's throat, leaving the teen's chest burning and gasping for breath. 

Tubular filaments of smaller hyphae brushed along the inside of his thighs, teasing the tissues of his sex organ, before guiding him into the cavity of Rick's chest. Morty gasped as his hips rolled forward and he buried himself into the body of his grandfather. He moaned and thrust his sex against the pulsing organ of Rick’s heart, feeling it ebb and swell and pulse beneath his erection. Animalistic sounds fell from their lips, and overstimulated, Morty's torso fell forward, knocking a few pieces of matter from Rick's body. He hissed as agitated insects writhed around Morty, ecstatic beneath his touch. Pressing his thumb into the hollow eye cavity, Morty tangled his hands around the shape of Rick's freshly exposed skull and called to him. The hyphae tubules suddenly and violently constricted around his body, cutting off the circulation of his blood.

"Hah.. Ohh Jeez. Grandpa Rick. I'm-" 

Morty's eyes rolled around in his skull. Swallowed by his sharpened senses, he was beginning to lose his sense of self. His fingers clenched around the anchoring presence, and with each rhythmic beat of his own, Morty's sex continued to brush against the shape of Rick's heart. Mycelium coiled and webbed itself around his legs, pulling the teen deeper into Rick's embrace. His head lulled, and his vision swam, but his heart continued to beat faster, surging toward orgasm. His body shook in ecstasy, and he groaned into the forest. He leaned forward and wrapped his arms around Rick’s neck in a yearning hug, pulling their bodies together as his own began to convulse in a euphoric chemical rush; every neuron pulsed around him like the surrounding bioluminescent life. 

“Grandpa Rick!” 

An efflorescent prehensile emerged from Rick’s heart, and the soft growth searched Morty’s body, pulsating against his skin as it searched for his entrance; life seeking to self-perpetuate. Spent of his energy, Morty's sensitive body jerked against his touch.

“Are you ready for me, Morty, I gotta admit, I’m in the middle of a strange adventure.”

Morty’s half-lidded gaze turned toward Rick, and his thoughts bloomed into an intoxicated sensation of lust and terror. He felt his mind slowly slipping away from him. His body had grown so heavy, he could barely lift his head. 

"Grand...pa Rick?" 

"Grandpa's got you." 

He wanted to open his body to Rick.

Warmth suddenly radiated from Morty's stomach. Rick had penetrated him, and Morty could feel the fluid draining from his body, watering the soil beneath them. Slow and inexorable, as it mixed with Rick’s body fluids in a violent inhuman ecstasy. Morty opened his mouth to scream, but only a whispered sigh escaped him. His eyes flitted around the beautiful forest, before returning to his grandfather as he lowered, and cradled Morty into his embrace. 

Morty's heartbeat fell away from its natural rhythm, and he heard the sound of the forest's silence.

Morty took part in Rick’s legacy and denied the finality of death. 

He’d never felt more alive. 

Rick’s kissed Morty’s forehead in greeting, “Let’s take our secrets to the grave.”

Rick's jaw fell open as he cocked his head back and set free an inhuman scream. It violently escaped his human body, spewing a stream of spores into the sky. They filled the ephemeral atmosphere like the first light of stars, effulgently refracting against the dusk threshold of twilight.

In silence, Rick nestled his chin over Morty's forehead. He trembled and shuddered as he settled into Morty’s form, and his arms protectively wrapped around him. They locked in an immovable death grip, and falling asleep within it, Morty closed his eyes and peacefully buried himself into Rick’s embrace.

The aural sound of the forest was a transcendent song.

Carried by soundwaves, spores floated gently through its wake. 

  


**Author's Note:**

> ###  Starry AU Constellation Map (Interconnected characters & fics in this AU)
> 
> [ ✦ Fic Endnotes ](https://starry-citadel-au.neocities.org/metamorphosis.html)   
[ ✦ Starry AU Homepage ](https://starry-citadel-au.neocities.org/index.html)   
[ ✦ Starry AU Citizens ](https://starry-citadel-au.neocities.org/citadel-citizens.html)   
[ ✦ Starry AU Locations](https://starry-citadel-au.neocities.org/citadel-locations.html)   

> 
> ### Kudos & Comments = ❤
> 
> Got damn, this sci-fi fic took a lot of work. If you enjoyed the adventure, I'd love to hear your thoughts, ideas theories and headcannons (I also love kudos and comments way more than I should).

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Metamorphosis](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22359019) by [futagogo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/futagogo/pseuds/futagogo)


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